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COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



THE BOOK OF LOVE 



Digitized by the Internet Archive 
in 2011 with funding from 
The Library of Congress 



http://www.archive.org/details/bookofloveOObark 



THE BOOK OF LOVE 



BY 

ELSA BARKER 

Author of *' The Frozen Grail and Other Poems,^ 
'* The Son of Mary BetheV 




NEW YORK 

DUFFIELD & COMPANY 

191^ 






Copyright, 1912 
Br DUFFIELD AND COMPANY 



vj 



€CI,A312246 
'/ 



^ 



I" CONTENTS 

^ When I am Dead and Sister to the Dust 

I. THE GARDEN #F ROSE AND RUE. 
A Quatrain Sequence 

1. The Rose 1 

2. The Rue 8 

II. LYRICS AND SONNETS 

page 

The Bride of the Overman 21 

,,-- I Know o . 22 

The Messenger 22 

Out of the Past 25 

Mate 27 

The Symbol ......... 27 

A Maiden 28 

^^A'Year Ago , ... 29 

Haunted . 29 

Song of Krishna 30 

You 31 

The Verge . 32 

^j-svSometime , .... 33 

"^"^ He Who Knows Love 34 

Love's Paradox 34 

In a Woman's Eyes 35 

The Wisdom of the Rose 36 

A Hidden Chord ....... 37 

The Parting Guest 37 

V 



PAGE 

Petit Amour .., . 38 

The Spectre 38 

Sisterhood . . ., . . .... 39 

The Beggar .......... 39 

L'Academiste ., .. ,.. 40 

The StaiF 40 

At Midnight 41 

Love's Fear 41 

Requiescat in Pace 42 

Love's Tragedy and Comedy .... 42 

Without the Temple 43 

When Love Cometh Not 43 

Even as You and I 44 

The Murderer 44 

Rose of Shiraz 45 

The Song of the Wandering Woman . . 45 

Many Advisers 46 

In the Dawnlight . 46 

Twin-Souls 48 

The Bungler 50 

Spring-Song of the Minstrel .... 50 

The Love of Woman 51 

The Slumberer 52 

The Violin ......... 52 

By the Sea 54 

Good-Bye 55 

In the Soul's House 56 

The Coming of Love 57 

Song of the Mortal Sun-Bride .... 58 

Under the Stars ....:.,... 60 

The Man-Child . . .. . . . , . 61 

Sapphics .......... 62 

Outside 63 

An Epistle 63 

The Angel ......... 66 

To the Unknown Love 68 

vi 



PAGE 

The Lonely Quest ... ,1 ,., r.i i. 69 

Salutation to the Lord of Love ..... 70 

The Way .. ,., ., . .. ,. ,.. ., ,.. 72 
III. AZELON. 

Azelon . . . ., ,., . . .., . ,., 75 

— — Far Away . . . . . ,. ., .. . 76 

In May 77 

Pervasion .... . i.. ..... 77 

Shadcw-Love . ., ,.,..... 78 

- Old Songs 79 

Love-Glance 79 

The Substance and the Shadow . . .80 

The Beckoner ,. . . 81 

The Gate . 81 

" The Secret Jewels 82 

When We are Old 83 

Sic Transit Gloria Mundi 83 

Passion Seeds 84 

The Stillborn 87 

The Intervener 89 

IV. THE HUMAN MIRROR. A Rhapsody . 93 

V. THE SPIRIT AND THE BRIDE. A Sonnet 
' Sequence. 

The Guerdon of Desire 117 

The Mystic Hill 117 

The Bridegroom 118 

The Mystic Messenger 119 

Out of the Maze 119 

Recognition 120 

The Spell 121 

Alter Ego 121 

-The Horoscope 122 

The Dream 123 

The Avowal 123 

vii 



PAGE 

Consummation 124 

Love's Fearlessness 125 

The Winds of Fate 125 

The Moon Path 126 

The Fog 127 

The Gift of Pain 127 

The Theft 128 

The Questioner 129 

The Answer 129 

Love Madness 130 

The Voyage 131 

The Moment 131 

Love's Hour of Silence 132 

Plenitude 133 

The Inscription 133 

Consecrated 134 

Duality 135 

The Miracle 135 

In Love's Eyes 136 

The Thrush 137 

A Vision .......... 137 

The Mystic Rose 138 

Indirection 139 

Aurora Borealis 139 

The Body 140 

Asleep 141 

The Indwelling Mystery 141 

At the Summit 142 

The Guest 143 

The Watcher 143 

In the Dawn Chamber , 144 

Why 145 

The Gentle One 145 

Caresses 146 

Fulfilment 147 

The Storm-Lord 147 

viii 



PAGE 

The Cup 148 

The Sanctuary 149 

Love's Avatars 149 

Creation 150 

Love's Infinity 151 

The Seal 151 

Realisation 152 

The Price of Love 153 

Love's Mystic Jewel 153 

Confession 154 

The Past 155 

The Covenanters 155 

Love-Sleep 156 

The Menace 157 

The Hand 157 

Sisters 158 

I Love You 159 

The Candle 159 

Exorcism 160 

Tears 161 

The Ideal ......... 161 

The Dual Vision 162 

Genesis 163 

The Triangle 163 

Love-Wraith 164 

The Silence of Love 165 

Summer- Absence 165 

The Clock 166 

The Sea of Love 167 

Nature-Longing 167 

Love's Lyceum 168 

Ephemera 169 

The Oak 169 

Under the Sky 170 

The Virgin Shrine 171 

The Child 171 

ix 



PAGE 

Words ............ 172 

The Veil . 173 

Truth .... ,. ,., .... 173 
The Cruel Word .. . . ... . ., . 174 

Joy of Love 175 

Isolation 175 

Absorption ...... ,., i. . 176 

Opulence ,.-.,,.,. .177 

As a Thousand Years . . . . . .177 

Parted , ,., . . . ,178 

Autumn 179 

Faith .,.,... 179 

The Letter 180 

Love's Wasted Days' . . . . . .181 

Separate . . .181 

Absence . . . . . r. . . . .182 

Waiting 183 

After Long Absence . . . . . .183 

The Abysm 184 

Insatiate 185 

Beyondness . 185 

Microprosopos . . ., >.) i. ,, . .186 
The Tower .... ., ,., ,., . .187 

Acme 187 

The Sacrament of Love 188 

When I Shall Lie in Death . . . .189 

The Unspoken 189 

Hidden Beauty . . . .... . .190 

The Pervader .... ,., .. . . 191 

Recompense . . ., ,.. , ,.. . . . 191 

The Man 192 

Illumination 193 

The Song and the Singer . . . . .193 

The Eagles 194 

The Tabernacle . . . ., .... 195 
Love's Humbleness .. .., ,., ,. ., . 195 

X 



PAGE 

Love's Baptism .196 

The Icy Path 197 

A Question 197 

The Rhythmic Heart 198 

The Presence 199 

The Sphere of Love 199 

The Touch of Beauty 200 

The Unassuagable 201 

At Love's Feet 201 

From the Void 202 

Love-Light 203 

The River 203 

At the Supreme Hour 204 

The Oasis .205 

The Thought of Thee 205 

Love's Immortality 206 

Beyond the Dragon's Gate 207 

The Tides 207 

Attainment 208 

Tipherath 209 

The Entity . 209 

The Iiispirer 210 

When You are Sad 211 

The Lyric Seed 211 

In the Stillness 212 

The Revelation 213 

A Dream of Death 213 

The Abiding Peace 214 

The Sower 215 

Master 215 

The Unrecorded 216 

The Clue 217 

The Supreme Gift 217 

Love's Day and Night 218 

The Hidden One 219 

Spirit of Beauty 219 

xi 



PAGE 

The Einblem .... . . ,. . . 220 

The Guardian of the Temple ., . „ . 221 
Woman- Love . ... ,„ „ . .221 

The Inner Light . .^ ...... 222 

The Paradigm 223 

Looking Upward .223 

The Broken Prayer . . ..... 224 

The Opener ......... 225 

The Sacrifice 225 

The Valley of Dismay 226 

The Great Dark 227 

The Titan 227 

The Well of Tears 228 

Within Love's Veil 229 

Withdrawn 229 

The Empty Room 230 

The Love-Singer 231 



Xll 



THE GARDEN OF ROSE AND RUE 
A QUATRAIN SEQUENCE 



When I am dead and sister to the dust; 
When no more avidly I drink the wine 
Of human love; when the pale Proserpine 

Has covered me with poppies, and cold rust 

Has cut my lyre-strings, and the sun has thrust 
Me underground to nourish the world-vine. 
Men shall discover these old songs of mine. 

And say: This woman lived — as poets must! 

This woman lived and wore life as a sword 
To conquer wisdom; this dead woman read 

In the sealed Book of Love and underscored 

The meanings. Then the sails of faith she spread. 

And faring out for regions unexplored, 

Went singing down the River of the Dead. 



THE GARDEN OF ROSE AND RUE 



THE ROSE 

When I entreated Life to make me wise. 
It drew aside Love's broidered veil of lies; 

And perilous Beauty, undivined before, 
Beckoned me from the mazes of his eyes. 

I do not care for gold, it is too cheap; 
Nor fame, whose field oblivion shall reap. 

But I would sing, and linger in the sun. 
And love — as only poets can — and sleep. 

The poorest lives some little blossoms bring 
To deck Love's altar in the days of spring. 

Save for the perfume of their vernal bloom, 
The pain of birth would seem too stern a thing. 

Only the poet looks Love in the eyes: 
He knows the meaning of the mystic sighs. 

The rapturous tears, the pain, the mad desire 
That starves upon the lips it satisfies. 

And after all our toils and dreams and prayers, 
'Tis only Love for which the future cares; 

Labour and fame are steps along Love's way, 
And art is but the garment that he wears. 

1 



Love, let us steal away into the night — 
Into the luring wonder of the night. 

Impassioned earth breathes through the lonely grove 
The cool delirious fragrance of the night. 

Yea, thou didst make me captive with a glance — 
An arrow shot across the gulfs of chance; 

Its gleam appeared to my enchanted eyes 
The light of immemorial romance. 

Thy body is a living shrine for me. 

Thy deep embrace the bread and wine for me; 

Thy fervid kisses are the prayers of faith. 
Thine eyes the altar lights that shine for me. 

The moon sheds no such glamour anywhere 
As on the nimbus of thy mystic hair; 

Each separate thread is an aspiring ray — 
An emanation luminous with prayer. 

Time's hidden ways thine eyes reveal to me: 
Deep in their vision broods the memory 

Of all the myriad lives thy soul has known. 
Thou passionate pilgrim of eternity! 

Thy voice is thrilling with an overtone 

That haunts the memory, like a whisper blown 

Upon the wind from somewhere in the dark: 
Maybe some ancient world our sires have known. 

2 



There is a sweeter sound than seraph hears: 
The rhythm that moves the ever-pulsing years 
Holds less of lure and wonder to the soul — 
The music of thy heart-beats to my ears. 

Thy breath is like the breath of orient nights. 
Whose brooding glamour fragrantly invites 
The fainting fancy to a couch where wait 
The trembling dreams of wild, mysterious rites. 

I touch the breathing marvel of thy flesh, 
., Like throbbing rose-leaves, and as dewy-fresh. 

How sprang this blossom from the common soil - 
World dust, that holds thy spirit in its mesh.'^ 

The immortal Breath blows o'er us where we lie 
* Beneath the star-leaved branches of the sky. 
Whispering a cosmic benedicite — 
O listen. Love, before the Word goes by! 

The lure of suns is but the lure of Love, 

Their all-creative warmth — the warmth of Love ; 

And symbol of the passion of the cross — 
The shadowy rood upon the breast of Love. 

In these unquenchable desires we feel 
The thirsty future's dominant appeal; 

And through the fire of our impassioned dust 
A thousand ancestors their loves reveal. 



3 



There is a dream that often comes to me 
In the grey dawn, and eyes me wistfully; 

'Tis little as the child in Mary's arms 
And all as lovely — and it looks like thee ! 

Lest Love should grow too earthly to aspire/ 
The wise gods blinded him with vague desire; 
They nourished him on dreams and ecstasies, 
Tempered his arrows in the sacred fire. 

They say thou art an idler, lover mine, 
Drunken with fancies, poetry and wine. 

What cares the nightingale for envious crows? 
Thy very faults are lovely — being thine. 

For me the cosmic aeons lie complete, 

O Love, between thy forehead and thy feet ! 

Here the untrammelled hours of day and night — 
Here dust and soul inalienably meet. 

My spirit is an emanated flame 

That burns the rose-leaves of its earthly frame, — 

Too vision-rapt to heed the rose's tears. 
Unmindful of her glory or her shame. 

Thy love is like deep waters all around — 
Warm pulsing waters, in whose brooding sound 

The lone wail of my heart is lulled with dreams, 
And the far clamour of the world is drowned. 



4 



Why do the vine and oak together dwell? 
Why does the sun the listening stars compel? 

Why does the moon allure the sighing sea? 
I am so wise with love that I could tell. 

Lover mine, I pray thee, do not weep ! 

The very earth is damp with tears — grave-deep ; 

Without thy bitter tribute, the brave sun 
Can never dry them ere Time calls to sleep. 

The joy of Love is better than Love's tears, 
So kiss me and forget thy foolish fears. 

Soon, soon the clammy dark lips of the grave 
In one cold kiss will hold us years on years ! 

How swift the merry sand runs in the glass ! 
The midnight daughters glide along the grass. 

Veiling their faces in their purple hair. 
Draw nearer — this enchanted hour will pass. 

The stars have chosen thee to be my king, 
To tune my lyre of life and make me sing; 

The pressure of thy rose-leaf lips on mine 
Is more inspiring than the breath of Spring. 

1 am the sun that warms thee with its heat, 

I am the dream that makes thy slumber sweet, 

I am the moon that watches thee all night, 
I am the sandals underneath thy feet. 



Draw close the mystic curtain of Love's bed: 
Here the dim Future and the Past are wed, 

And brooding Isis veils her mysteries — 
To whelm the world when thou and I are dead. 

In my life's soil thy life is planted deep. 
Never to be uprooted; and I keep 

The lyric seeds thy love has sown in me 
For a rare harvest all the world shall reap. 

Thou art the dream between Love's day and night. 
In thy strange being Love's extremes unite: 

The trance-like prayer that purifies the soul, 
The throbbing senses in their fierce delight. 

Thy dear white feet are moistened with my tears. 
Oh, what rose-shrouded thorns, what spectral fears 

Lurk for their toilsome passing in the dark 
Along the tragic pathway of the years ! 

The lily petals of thy hand are light 

As vagrant dreams. I feel them in the night — 

Soft as the lotus of some lunar lake 
That drowses on the waves in vague delight. 

Love dreams and murmurs something in his sleep. 
With what strange secret do I vigil keep? 

Maybe some slumbering passion of dead days! 
I veil my face in Love's long hair and weep. 



Love wakes and leans above me in the dark, 

Half dazed with dreams that thrill the teeming dark; 

His warm soft lips feel blindly for my lips 
In the delirious wonder of the dark. 

Love ineffable! When fused we lie, 

Life piercing life, through flesh and breath and eye, 

I know not if this fiery luminous form — 
This river of lyric flame be thou or I ! 

The muses whisper to me from thy hair; 
Thy languorous look is perfume on the air. 
Thy breath a bridal veil that covers me. 
Thy touch a wild insatiable prayer. 

1 lay my spirit in thine open hands; 
Between thy fingers the ecstatic sands 

Of my life tremble. This unearthly dream 
Only the poet ever understands! 

The birds are singing, and my lover sleeps. 
The rosy light of morning slowly creeps 
Over the moveless beauty of his face: 
Who knows this hour knows Love's sublimest deeps. 

So still is Love he hears the farthest sound: 
The footfall of the seasons in their round. 

The soft etheric swish of the rushing spheres. 
The murmur of the mute things underground. 



II 

THE RUE 

The night I learned that Love was false to me. 
Beside my bed the stars watched pitilessly, — 

Old midwives, muttering at each moan of pain: 
" The birth-pangs of a soul are good to see ! " 

little hour of Love, so wild and sweet! 
i I gave the world, thy honey-dew to eat; 

And now the tear-sown pathway of the dead 
Echoes the patter of thy flying feet. 

1 can no longer bear thy burning eyes — 

They brand me, blind me; and thy smothered sighs 

Of passion are as poison to my soul. 
That drinks its fill of death with avid cries. 

Love, my Love, thou art so bitter-sweet! 

1 would that from thy forehead to thy feet 

Thou wert some deadly flower, that I might pluck 
And crush thy petals for my soul to eat. 

Sometimes I love thee so I wish thee dead. 
I would devour thy being as my bread; 

Would drain thy hidden veins dry, as of wine, 
Red drop by drop, for all my heart has bled! 

Oh ! I have bought in lonely, endless nights 
My fill of thee who art all strange delights — 

8 



The thrill of roses^ and the viol's cry. 
The pang of the earth-passion's awful rites. 

And I am jealous of the very light 

That bares thy beauty from the veil of night: 

Deep in the dungeon of my sombre soul 
Thy body I would bury out of sight. 

Oh, kill me with thy kisses! Drain me dry 
Of pain and life, nor leave me breath to sigh; 

Yea, feed my spirit, starving at thy lips, 
Thy sweet perfidious poison ere I die! 

Bury me deep beyond all isolate pains 

In the dim shadows of thy thralling veins; 

That nevermore may there be sound of me, 
Or colour of me in all the earth contains. 

I then shall have no being save in thine: 
My love shall mingle with thy blood as wine 

Mingles with water, and thy wanton soul 
Shall never know a life apart from mine. 

Give me to drink the poison of thy breast — 
Dark cruel wine from grapes of passion pressed — 

Till I am drunk beyond delirium's dream 
In that dim utter deep where men may rest. 

There is a crevice in Love's garden wall 

Where mandrakes thrive, with lilies rank and tall; 

Where stealthy Death peers through a purple veil 
In madmen's eyes, and strange worms crawl and crawl. 

9 



I gave my lover tears and sacrifice, 

My soul's white prayer, my dreams of paradise. 

The vision of my guardian angel's face: 
He laughed and turned away his weary eyes. 

I gave my lover kisses bitter-sweet, 

Strange deadly blossoms for his soul's defeat. 

The purple paths of hell I lured him on: 
His lips burn fiercely on my tear-stained feet. 

The thorny rose of Love has one last sting 
Tipped with a poison strange and maddening. 

Who grasps it close shuns not the touch of Death; 
To love and loathe the self-same lovely thing. 

My lover whispers lies into my ear; 

My listening soul laughs silently to hear, — 

The still, ironic laughter of the tomb, 
Of merry skulls that grin from ear to ear. 

She wore a lily in her golden hair — 

That Azra — on the day Love found her fair. 

Oh ! I shall dread the lilies till I die, 
And tremble at their perfume on the air. 

I hang upon Love's shoulder worship-wise, 
Lost in the dreamy glamour of his eyes; 

With far-off meditative gaze he asks — 
If I have seen how blue are Azra's eyes! 



10 



I lie alone under the mocking sky. 

The midnight hours indifferently walk by. 

O wanton Moon ! You turn your back on me, 
To gaze and smile where Love and Azra lie ! 

For we must laugh if we would hold our place 
In Nature's pitiless, capricious grace. 

He who desires to dally with the moon 
Must never come with tears upon his face. 

No desert waste is lonelier than I. 

The arid pain of Love has burned me dry. 

But passion's prayers turn backward on my lips — 
I will not be Love's beggar though I die! 

My false Love may seek pleasure where he will. 
While I my separate destiny fulfil — 

Grinding my soul against the adamant 
Of self, whose dust obscures my vision still. 

But of tliis Azra nothing shall remain 
More than of last year's lilies or its rain, 

Except her strange name echoing through my song- 
Immortal with the laurels of my pain. 

My lover left me — and I shed no tears ! 
Across the world I wonder if he hears 

The laughter of my soul at her own grief, , , 

Low pallid laughter — sadder than all tears! 



11 



We have a bitter power who laugh at pain, 
Who laugh and laugh — for tears are shed in vain. 
They weary lovers and amuse the gods: 

tender thought to soothe the reeling brain! 

1 felt thine essence quivering like wine 

Through all my veins, that leaped to answer thine — 

Our spirits fusing in a flash of flame — 
The day I bought thy soul and blood with mine. 

When thou art false, my Love, I know full well 
There is no truth — this side the gate of hell. 

No little lily soul unstained by lies. 
No sphere of beauty not an empty shell. 

Is there no anodyne despair may buy, 

No draught of dreamless sleep for such as I? 

Discordant singer in the choir of Love, 
Who neither cares to live nor dares to die. 

How many minutes are there in a day? 
Love's restless watchers know, and only they: 

The clock ticks, and the quivering nerves are strained 
For sound of steps — that never come their way. 

If women really die and burn in hell, 

They do not burn with fire — the prophet's hell. 

No ! But they wait, and wait, and wait, and wait. 
For one who never comes — the woman's hell. 



12 



Thy vacant room is an enchanted place; 
Thy wraith pervades the air that I embrace; 

The perfume of thy presence lingers still 
About the pillow where I lay my face. 

I touch thy garments lightly, half afraid, 
So ghostly are they in the teeming shade. 

The candle flickers, like a frightened soul, 
Before the little altar where we prayed. 

The stars are not so lonely as my heart! 
Though I should scale the cruel cliff's of Art 

And cut my name into their granite face — 
Love's way and mine would lie as far apart. 

The pain of Love has poisoned all the day. 
Pitiless Love, that lures but to betray! 
And pitiless the whisper of the soul: 
Like songs and worlds, this too shall pass away. 

Life plays us mortals many a strange jest: 
Dead leaves and grave-dew crown our aching quest. 
And when Love comes to cheer us by the way — 
Always the one we love not, loves us best. 

Only the Lord of Change has endless sway. 
The vanished Love of our dead yesterday 

Now wanders wailing down the woods of dream. 
And mocking shadows beckon where we lay. 



13 



The world's poor travesty of Love stalks by, 
Linked arm in arm with Death — a smiling lie ! 

Its empty words and empty laughter bring 
The tears of pity to the lover's eye. 

Deep Love is slow of speech and void of art; 
Silence and timid tears reveal his heart. 

But shallow Love is ever eloquent 
To mouth his meagre passion — and depart. 

Ye who would know how sweet a thing is Love, 
Go ask the souls outside the pale of Love — 

The pallid priest, the love-mocked Magdalen — 
They also know how bitter a thing is Love. 

O silent watcher of the mystic fire ! 
When to your hidden temple I retire 

To still my soul, between your eyes and mine 
Falls like a veil the shadow of Desire. 

And oh, the pity of that piercing, vain 
Delight, that fills again and yet again 

The hollow world with little yearning souls — 
Swelling the awful sum of mortal pain! 

Pale passion and red hatred strove with me. 

And dark pride strove, pain, and gaunt jealousy; 

Strove till they all lay dead one stormy day. 
My soul, surprised, awoke to find her free! 



14 



But I am weary and I long to sleep. 

The hungry flame of Love has burned so deep 

Into the tender substance of my life, 
I care no more either to laugh or weep. 

How heavy is the earth's heart as it hears 
Ever the dropping, dropping of Love's tears! 

Must not those bitter, murmuring waters drown 
The choral harmonies of kindred spheres? 

The cool white flower of peace must bloom for me 
Somewhere between the mountain and the sea: 
The sea in whose wide bed I may not rest. 
The mountain whose austerities I flee. 

Oh, for .the pure oblivion of sleep! 

In those vast waters I would sink me deep 

Beyond where both desire and dream lie dead, 
And passion and despair forget to weep. 

Death hides no hell that could awake my fear, 
For I have heard the sound that madmen hear, 

Heard the far wail of a crushed, tortured thing — 
My own strayed soul, and seen it disappear! 

Who dares to love unloved the cord unties 
In whose close coils the fettered spirit lies; 

The jealous gods blush and evade his glance. 
And joy and pain are equally his prize. 



15 



He loves me not, and all the world is grey. 
^ But I am wiser now than yesterday! 

If he had laid life's roses in my lap — 
I never should have known the world was grey. 

The sun has dried the tear-drops in my eyes, 
The sturdy wind has blown away my sighs. 

While the sun laughs, I am ashamed to weep; 
And the wind is old and knows all sorrow dies. 

Now will I sing my song, that not in vain 
Shall be my passage through the fiery rain, — 

A song of light, for the world's heart would break 
If I should sing the story of my pain. 

The distillation from Love's bleeding heart 
Is the rose-attar of the lyric mart; 

And Pain and Passion are the sentinels 
That double-guard the jealous doors of Art. 

Poor lover, writhing in the lonely night. 
Thy vale of hell leads to a solemn height: 

Who dares the fire, and gains the farther side, 
Walks with the sons of God in the great light. 

Ye who would know Love's highest reach of bliss — 
The still, white peaks of peace — remember this : 
\ Before a soul can face that steady light 
It must have plumbed pain's nethermost abyss. 



16 



I sought my soul in joy — she was not there. 
Vainly I sought her too in toil and prayer. 

At last I found her with illumined eyes 
Walking the rainbow of my Love's despair. 



17 



II 

LYRICS AND SONNETS 



THE BRIDE OF THE OVERMAN 

Oh, do not remember these womanly tears 

That I shed on your wondering face! 
They are drops from the wells of unspeakable fears 
That lurk in the cavernous dusk of, dead years 

Awaiting a time and a place, — i 

Fears of old memories clamouring still 

For a glance of my soul or a sign; 
And they mock at the feeble and passionate will 
That would render immortal the touch and the thrill 

Of a man's clinging lips upon mine. 

Swearing fidelity far beyond death. 

The presumptuous children of clay 
Would make love's ideal a loud shibboleth, 
When everything under the law of the Breath 

May claim but the hour and the day. . 

O lover as wise as the magi of old ! 

You have given me rapture more vast 
Than God's dream of creation; and yet we are told 
That the mightiest passion must some day lie cold 

In the bottomless gulf of the past. 

And our love — nay Beloved, regard not the tears. 

Or kiss them away if you will — 
Our love shall be wide as the sweep of the spheres, 
And free as the music the Overman hears 

In his cave on the crown of the hill. 

21 



But sometimes, I know, at the terror night brings 

In this land without pathway or mark, 
I shall cling to your hand as a little child clings, 
Lest your candle go out in the wind from God's wings, 
And leave me alone with the shadowless things 
In the emptiness under the dark. 

/ KNOW 

Oh ! I know why the alder trees 
Lean over the reflecting stream; 

And I know what the wandering bees 
Heard in the woods of dream. 

I know how the uneasy tide 

Answers the signal of the moon. 

And why the morning-glories hide 
Their eyes in the forenoon. 

And I know all the wild delight 
That quivers in the sea-bird's wings, 

For in one little hour last night 
Love told me all these things. 

THE MESSENGER 

O PALE pressed flower 
That has crossed the world-wide sea 
From my Orient-wandering Love 
With words for me! 

22 



Frail messenger 

Of a dream that does not die, 
Though all the threads of life 
Be drawn awry! 

Your Asian stem 
Drew from that storied earth 
The essences that gave 
The pale Christ birth. 

Beauty and faith, 
And a something all unknown, 
On your sweet and subtle breath 
To me are blown. 

Give you, he says. 

Soft kisses and send you back 

To his tent where the world's way joins 

The pilgrim's track. 

O flower! tell him 
These messages for me: 
Tell him there lies the old haze 
Over the sea. 

Tell him the path 
To the little house and lawn 
Is overgrown with grass 
Now he is gone. 



Tell him the vine 

On the arbour is bare of leaves; 

Now it has nothing to hide 

It pines and grieves. 

Tell him the star 
That recorded our bridal vow 
In the book of the summer dark 
Is shining now. 

Tell him the crows 

In the pine-tree still arise 

To challenge the wraith of dawn 

With warning cries. 

Tell him the glass 

That used to mirror the sea 

And our twined forms now mirrors 

Only the sea. 

Give him these tears. 
And tell him the golden heart 
Of the rose of life grows grey 
When lovers part. 



24 



OUT OF THE PAST 

Somewhere, Love, in the far-off, time-veiled days of 

the great past. 
Thou and I and the beautiful Love-god danced in the 

sunshine. 
Somewhere, too, as the night dew lay on the leaves of 

the jungle. 
Thou didst whisper me softly the unknown mystical 

Word. 

Under thy languorous eyelids, dark as the doors of the 

future. 
Strange dreams, wild dreams, beckon my rapt soul. 

Oh, to allay my 
Fever and longing there in the midnight pools of the 

lotus. 
Losing myself and the world in the brooding embrace 

of thine eyes! 

Thy dark hair is a veil of the Mystery. Under the 

shadows — 
Purple with Orient heat, deep sultriness — something 

is hidden. 
Something my lone soul needs. Though it yield to the 

touch of my fingers. 
Still it eludes my sight while maddening me to the 

quest. 



25 



Thy touch. Love, is the sun*s touch, pure as the breath 

of the morning; 
Thy touch. Love, is the bite of the fire — unassuagable 

passion ; 
Under thy hand or thy hot lips — aye, in the cling of 

thy garments — 
Ecstasy waits, pain hides, power quivers to move me 

to life. 

Through thine eyes I am one with the deathless One of 

the ages. 
Thy strong hold is the life-hold, firm with the urge of 

creation. 
Under thy spell Time listens and stirs not; there the 

immortal 
Silence pauses to drink of the rushing river of joy. 

Where did I lose thee? Where in the garden of devi- 
ous byways. 

Love, did we loosen our hands? Oh, hold me close and 
forever ! 

So the celestial Gardener may not distinguish between 
us. 

So we appear to His eyes one rose on the tree of the 
world. 



26 



MATE 

There is a wistful prayer 
That often comes to me, 

And lays its face against my face 
In utter ecstasy — 

That all the lovers in the world 
Might be as near as we! 



THE SYMBOL 

Thy love is a symbol, a mystical sign *^ 

Of vast, unuttered things; 
The bread and the sacramental wine 
Of my faith I receive at Love's veiled shrine 

In all thy ministerings. 

Thy love is my dream in the mortal night, 

A web by the earth-moth spun, 
A veil for the unendurable Light; 
It softens the blaze for my frail sight 

Of the immanent unseen Sun. 

Thy love is realisation's hour. 

High noon on the disc of life; 
The sands of its time are the sands of power 
In the glass of Fate, round whose watch-tower 
The cosmic winds are at strife. 
27 



Thy love is the promise of keener bliss 
\ Than earth-dazed beings feel; 
The rush of its blood is the flaming kiss 
Of stars on the edge of the great abyss 
Where form and spirit reel. 

Thy love is a danger beyond all fear, 

A rift in the fathomless void; 
From its perilous deep strange faces peer. 
And pale hands beckon to some far sphere 

Where self shall be destroyed. 

Thy love is the peace of eternity, 

The rest that follows birth; 
The fold of thine arms is the fold of the sea, 
And they hold and soothe and cradle me 

As the ocean holds the earth. 



A MAIDEN 

" Give me Love, O Life," I cried, 

** Give me Love, though naught beside ! 

I would know the way he wanders. 
For the world is wide." 

Then I found him at my side. 
For my prayer was not denied; 

And the narrow world has nowhere 
For my heart to hide ! 
28 



A YEAR AGO 

How strange it seems that one brief year ago 
Indifferently I watched you passing by, 
Nor dreamed that in your half-averted eye 

Love's universe was mirrored! Even so 

Bloom lilies by the stream whose overflow 

Shall sweep them from their moorings, and untie 
Theii' roots from the home soil. A bee may fly 

To windward of a rose-bush and not know. 

With all his hidden wisdom. Love is blind! 

You were the messenger of Destiny 
That paused before my dwelling undivined. 

A year ago your spirit was for me 
The pearl a diver risks his life to find — 

And passes in the darkness of the sea. 

HAUNTED 

What is that sound on the wind, my Love, 

That little wail of fright? 
Is it the cry of a lone lost dove 
Somewhere up in the boughs above 

Our window this wild night .^ 

What is that shadow along the wall 

That wavers and is still .^ 
It is very faint and very small 
To fill my soul with this weird appal, 

This weight of unknown ill. 
29 



O Love, there are fingers upon my hair. 

And yours are fast in mine! 
Is it a breath of the midnight air 
That blows on my forehead and lingers there? 

Or is it a ghostly sign? 

Gather me close in your strong arms, Dear, 

And hold me tenderly; 
For I dare not whisper the thing I fear. 
Unless I feel you near — Oh, near - — 

To the throbbing heart of me! 

It is not a shadow that wavers there. 

Nor a dove that moans in pain. 
Nor a breath of the night wind on my hair: 
'Tis the pilgrim Soul from the realm of air 
That knocked at our door in vain! 



SONG OF KRISHNA 

I AM all things, and I lie in thine arms! 

Thou dost embrace in me Time and the measure of 

Time, 
The thrill of all joy, and the rush of the stars through 

the outermost virginal void. 

I am Love that binds, and I am the great Unbinder. 
Life has no gifts that my hands do not scatter. 
And darkness is the shadow of mine eyelids. 

30 



Beauty burns in her veil for the vision of those I em- 
brace. 
When I whisper to my Love in the stillness, 
Somewhere on earth a musician hears divine harmony. 
Somewhere a flower opens. 

I will not leave thee, for without me there is nothing; 

When thou feelest the touch of thy friend in the night- 
time, know I am there; 

When in the rush of the great waters terror comes nigh 
thee, know I am there. 

All lovers are only the promise of me,' 

And what are all lovers beside me? 



YOU ^ 

Through you the beauty of the world lies bare. 

I feel the breeze like God's breath on my face 
Whispering an unknown word — and everywhere 

I see the vision of a love-lit face. 

So strange it seems ! A little while ago 
I knew not any of these lovely things; 

To all my dreams the demons answered no. 
Darkening the daylight with their evil wings. 

Tell me, Beloved, for your words are wise. 
How do you hold all beauty in your hand. 

And all the host of heaven in your eyes. 
And in your hours the moons of fairyland? 

31 



You pass my threshold, and the narrow room 
Is peopled with the tenuous forms of air, 

The barren boughs of faith are all abloom. 
And I am mute with wonder and with prayer. 



THE VERGE 

Oh, tell me, traveller, I pray, 
Where my slain love lies dead! 

My soul has wandered up and down. 
By grief and terror led, 

But found no token save the drops 
Her own bruised feet have bled. 

Along the cypress-shaded way 
Strange shadows come and go; 

The ghosts of all love's buried hours 
Walk with me, pale and slow; 

But I would rather go alone. 
Because they beckon so. 

Further I fare along the road; 

But there is nothing here 
Save empty spaces, and the glooms 

Where grope weird shapes of fear — 
The grim, mad phantoms of the mind 

That stare and mock and leer. 



32 



Somewhere there is an awful place 
Where all dead things lie cold; 

Prayers, passions and forgotten tears. 
Kisses, and lies long told, 

Shame, soft caresses, sleep and faith, — 
They all lie there and mould. 

There love may lie. But my tired feet 

Will never find the way. 
They falter. The Lethean waves 

Lap round them cold and grey. 
In those dead waters let me rest 

Until the Judgment Day! 



SOMETIME 



^ 



Sometime the Spring will come with softer green 
Than ever dared to touch the world before; 

Sometime the Guest my soul has never seen 
Will pass the threshold of my waiting door. 

Sometime the passion of my book of song 

Will face me in the eyes of Destiny; 
Sometime the Question I have asked so long 

Of the slow stars, will turn and answer me. 

A sail, now tossing on the sea of dreams, 

Sometime will rest in the broad port of waking; 

Sometime the Weaver, that now idle seems. 

Will show some splendid fabric of her making. 



There lies a light upon the peaks of faith 

That makes my heart beat faster as I climb; 

And wistfully before me floats a wraith — 

The Presence that will walk with me sometime. 



HE WHO KNOWS LOVE 

He who knows Love — becomes Love, and his eyes 
Behold Love in the heart of everyone, 
Even the loveless: as the light of the sun 

Is one with all it touches. He is wise 

With undivided wisdom, for he lies 

In Wisdom's arms. His wanderings are done, 
For he has found the Source whence all things run 

The guerdon of the quest, that satisfies. 

He who knows Love becomes Love, and he knows 
All beings are himself, twin-born of Love, 

Melted in Love's own fire, his spirit flows 
Into all earthly forms, below, above; 

He is the breath and glamour of the rose. 
He is the benediction of the dove. 



LOVE'S PARADOX 

The tears of hopeless love are bitter-sweet; 
Its cruel rocks that tear the lover's feet 

To him are dearer than the flower-strewn ways — 
The careless ways where youth and pleasure meet. 

64 






IN A WOMAN* S EYES 

Last night I walked with Love along the world, 
The crowded world, so strange to Love and me, 
The freighted sphere, that through the starry sea 

To some uncharted port is blindly whirled. 

I walked with Love, our faces luminous 

With that unearthly light which lovers throw 
Around their presence. Passing to and fro. 

The hurrying people paused to look at us. 

But in one woman's eyes there blazed red hate 
For me, — a little woman like a dove, 
Drooping and timid, who once walked with Love 

Up to the very entrance of Life's gate; 

But feared to lift its latch of destiny. 

And feared to tread upon the sacred ground 

Of that sweet grove where Love and I have found 

The budding rose-tree of Infinity. 

Her blue eyes burned down to my startled soul. 
Then Love and I passed on into the wide 
Compassionate solitude where we abide. 

Where Peace has conquered Pain, and crowns his goal. 

But through Love's eyes those sad eyes gazed in mine 
Till dawn, not blazing now but dim with weeping; 
And Love and I — a mystic vigil keeping — 

Watched with her spirit in its tear-lit shrine. 

35 



O little sister ! at your door to-day- 
There waits a love you would not understand; 
As if you were my child in some dead land 

To whose long memories I have lost my way. 

Or is it all a dream? And from Love's heart — 
Being so blended with him — do I gain 
This comprehension of an alien pain, 

A shadow in whose form I have no part? 



THE WISDOM OF THE ROSE 

Do not wound me or I die, 

O my Rose ! " I heard him cry ; 

*' Cover all thy thorns with soft leaves. 
Lest thy lover sigh." 

But I pressed my sharpest thorn 
Deep into his heart that morn; 

Though the pain I felt him suffer 
Left me, too, all torn. 

And he died, as he had said. 
Desolate, uncomforted. 

And the kind old earth, our Mother, 
Drank the drops he bled. 



36 



A HIDDEN CHORD 

A GIRL gazed long at Love in going by ; 
I saw the great light shining in her eye — 

The look Love's eyes have when they gaze at me. 
The quick tears wet my cheek — I wonder why ! 



THE PARTING GUEST 

The bright-winged Eros came one summer day 
With roses for us, and a smiling claim 
That we should join him in his magic game 

Of making golden images of clay; 

Until I grew aweary of his play. 

Weary and burdened with a secret shame 
For every word we uttered in his name: 

Now I am glad that he is flown away. 

Let us go up, dear, to the wind-blown hill; 

The air is pure there, and the strong pine-trees 
Laugh in the light. . . . Seems the sheer height 
too chill? 

Nay, draw thy mantle close. In hours like these 
The valley-dweller hears, when all is still. 

The far-off roar of the eternal seas. 



S7 



PETIT AMOUR 

There was a little love all lily-pale, 

Too fair and white to breast life's bitter gale. 

It died, as little loves are wont to die, — 
A gnat's death weighed as much in the Great Scale! 



THE SPECTRE 

Out of the deep where dim-remembered years 
And buried loves await Time's sure intent, 
Rises the spectre of that far event 

Which taught the master-mystery of tears 

To my expectant heart. How strange appears 
That face, which my imagination lent 
The beauty of God, till — rapt and confident — 

My soul forgot her heritage of fears ! 

Since last I looked in those illusive eyes. 
My spirit in the lake of lustral flame 

Has been washed white of everything that dies 
In pain. And though this end was not an aim 

He laboured toward, my freed life testifies 

Its debt to him for power, and love, and fame. 



38 



SISTERHOOD 

Sister, the world would deem me a strange thing 
To love the former love of my heart's king; 

But jealous self bows to the mystic bond — 
We two have drunk deep of one sacred spring! 



THE BEGGAR 

In the dim years before I met with you i 

I dreamed how Love one day would come to me, 
A plumed knight, who on his bended knee 
His sovereign lady would acclaim and woo; 
And I should hold his homage as my due, 

With smiling pride elude him, nor agree 

Too readily to listen to his plea. 
Though, as I dreamed, his every word was true. 

Then came the night I looked into your eyes . . . 

O love that burns and memory that sears ! 
I am no longer proud, though strangely wise 

In the dark lore of ecstasy and tears, — 
A starving beggar at your knees, who cries 

For bread to dull the yearning of the years. 



89 



I 



L'ACADEMISTE 

A LEARNED fool discovcred Love one day, 
And sought to demonstrate his tyrant sway 

In dull iambics. While the muses yawned. 
Love laughed — and shook his wings — and flew away ! 



THE STAFF 

'TwAs long ago, with fasting and with prayer, 
I cut my pilgrim staiF from the great tree 
Of sacrifice, and it has been with me 

In all my wandering. Rugged and bare. 

And dry as ancient stone, up the steep stair — 
The winding granite stair of destiny — - 
The staff has gone beside me steadily, 

Aye, urged me on under the load of care. 

But yesterday the beauty of the Spring 

Trembled through all my being, and I leaned 

Upon my staff — to feel it quivering; 

To see that its whole rigid length had greened. 
Had grown all tender with soft buds, that screened 

The eyes of Love. . . . And then I heard him 
sing ! 



40 



AT MIDNIGHT 

There is a nagging nettle in my bed, 

And wayward Sleep goes by with careless tread 

To-night I saw a shadow on Love's face, 
To haunt me for those idle words I said. 



LOVE'S FEAR 

I AM afraid, because I love thee so ! — 

Afraid lest the inexorable years 

Instruct thee in the pitiless lore of tears — 
Intimate lore I mastered long ago. 
My courage falters for thee; but I know 

Those secret drops the eyelids of all seers 

Are bitter with, before the way appears 
Where the wise lilies of compassion grow. 






Dear, I shall see thee stricken with despair, '1 

And have no anodyne to ease thy pain. 
Nor promise of an answer to thy prayer. 

For we invoke the Lord of Life in vain 
Who plead against experience, or dare 

To turn aside God's arrow — though Love be slain! |l 



41 



REQUIESCAT IN PACE 

When Love is dead — ^rhy stain his lips with lies ! 
Love knows no rest, no honour as he dies; 

But goaded to feign joy and life, he wears 
The world's arraignment in his weary eyes. 



LOVE'S TRAGEDY AND COMEDY 

Once on a time in my untutored past, 
I raised an altar to Love's Tragedy 
And covered it with rue and rosemary; 

Then with sad rapture at its base I cast 

My soul in dedication. But at last 

Great Love himself came by and beckoned me 
With slow indulgent smile, so bold and free 

That Tragedy drew down her veil — aghast. 

Behind Love came a being robed in flowers — 
Love's Comedy, with summer in her glance; 

The laughing sister whose transforming powers 
Can turn life's laggard march into a dance. 

With Love and her so gaily go the hours, 
I bless them both for my deliverance. 



42 



WITHOUT THE TEMPLE 

Nay, dear, I do not love you any more! 
Put out the altar fire and close the door. 

Love's holy temple that we built for him 
I must profane not — now I love no more. 



WHEN LOVE COMETH NOT 

The hours are ages when Love cometh not. 

The very sunshine stays reservedly 

Outside the window, and the vigilant sea 
Booms with a lagging rhythm. Storm shadows blot 
The scroll of heaven; while the uncertain spot 

Of substance where my soul waits, seems to be 

A desert island in eternity. 
Washed by the tides of time, by God forgot. 

This cruel hour will pass, and I shall hear. 

Quivering, Love's eager hands upon the door . . 

Yet there might come a cold, inclement year 
When Love would not avail me as before. 

When I should be less lovely and less dear — 
A wind-blown barque upon a barren shore! 



'4B 



! 

i 



EVEN AS YOU AND I 

O BROTHER mine, I hear strange dole of you 
From her who flatters — and takes toll of you ! 

She must lay off the blinding veil of Self 
To see the strong, true, comrade soul of you. 



THE MURDERER 

To them that murder Love, of no avail 
Shall be the penance of a thousand years. 
At every midnight to my soul appears 

Upon the sea of sleep a spectral sail. 

I see the moonlight wavering and pale 

On the remembered face of him that steers, 
Deep graven with the ghosts of many tears - 

The weariness of them that love and fail. 

And when in the dawn-twilight cold and grey 
I wake, despair and emptiness are mine. 

Though I implore, the vision will not stay; 
But on the purple dim horizon line 
There lies a deeper shadow, for a sign 

That in the night a soul has passed that way. 



44< 



1 

I 



ROSE OF SHIRAZ 

My lover is a Mussulman, 'tis said. 

Whose loves are strung like jewels on a thread. 

I'd rather be the clasp that holds the string 
Than shine alone on any other head. 



THE SONG OF THE WANDERING WOMAN 

Thou hast broken my soul on the wheel. 

Thou hast drunk of my sorrow as wine, 
Thou hast branded my brow with thy seal. 

And my faith thou hast hung for a sign. 

Thou hast spilled all my dreams on the ground 

And broken the strings of my lyre. 
And the chords of my being are bound 

By memories that mock at desire. 

Thou has taught me the knowledge of years 

In a day, of despair I am wise ; 
Thou hast moistened thy bread with my tears, 

And groped in the gloom of my sighs. 

O Beloved, whose breath is my pain ! j] 

Thy shadow has darkened the world; 
For thy spirit is thunder and rain. 

And thy love is a meteor hurled. 

45 



But thy darkness is dearer than light. 

So I die, and my cry to be free 
Is a song of redemption to God in the night 

For the sins of the world and of me. 



MANY ADVISERS 

O Love, I care not whether they were right — 
The cold advisers, or the words they said. 

When in the teeming silence of the night 
I hear your heart throb underneath my head ! 



IN THE DAWNLIGHT 

Beloved, whose garment is life. 

Whose eyes are the twin wonders of light and the 
vision of light: 

Give me a glimpse behind the cosmical veil that covers 
Thy beauty. 

Make palpable to me a touch of Thine inscrutable ten- 
derness. 

I would know the self-sufficiency of Thy love. 

For I am weary of all Love's demands and apologies. 

I would be solitary as the quiet stars. 

Though intimate with the world as a nursing child 
with its mother. 

I would dream to-day on the orient lake with the lotus, 



46 



I would strive to-morrow with the northern pine in the 

tempest. 
In the morning I would wander alone looking for the 

lost Pleiad in the vast meadows of Taurus, 
I would swarm in the afternoon with the myriad bees 

in the clover meadows of Earth. 
I would mumble prayers with the pilgrims on the road 

to Mecca, 
I would laugh with the children of joy in the grov«s 

of Bacchus, 

Deep in the hearts of all the earth-kindred are secrets 
I hunger to learn. 

When I hear the call of the wild bird in the spring- 
time. 

There stirs in me the vague responsive mate-longing 
of the woods. 

The moody look in the eyes of the caged panther fills 
me with fear; 

But there is a thought in his brain that I need for a 
marvellous poem, 

And I shall never be wise till I understand its mean- 
ing. 

I have seen in the eyes of a dog I have slighted a look 
that shamed me. 

The dignity of the love that waits and questions not — 
transcending my own for my lover! 

I would be friends with the earthworm, and even the 
robin distrusts me; 

There is something known to the squirrels that books 
have never taught me, 

47 



But when I question them they always run away. 

And the silence that broods in the sacred aisles of the 

congregated pine-trees — 
Is gone with the sound of my footsteps ! 

But somewhere the transcendent Wonder awaits me — 
The vision of primordial and ultimate Love that is 

hidden in the dark of the ages before and after: 
It but awaits the destined hour to make me one with 

all things. 
Will the revelation come to me in the eyes of my lover? 
Will it come in the symbols of a dream, haloed around 

with the light of its own interpretation? 
Is it something divine that shall penetrate and possess 

me? 
Or only the boundless expansion of all that is I? 



TWIN-SOULS 

T AM thy fellow-spirit 

Who journeyed at thy side 
Before the Sphinx was builded^ 

Before Osiris died. 

I am thy soul's companion 
Who lost thee in the wave 

That rose when old Atlantis 
Went down to her sea-grave. 



48 



One greater than great Isis 
Joined^ with a rite sublime_, 

Thy soul and mine together 
In the far dawn of time. 

When to thine eyes at midnight 

The tears unbidden starts 
And vague bewildered longings 

Ache in thy lonely hearty, 

Know that my soul is calling 
Somewhere, and making moan 

Unto the laggard Future 
To give it back its, own. 

When in the ghostly twilight 

A shadow on the wall 
Sets all thy nerves aquiver — 

'Tis I, who mutely call; 

And when the passionate springtime 
Renews its ancient quest, 

I am the vagrant wonder 
That trembles in thy breast. 



49 



THE BUNGLER 

I MADE a man out of my own great need. 
I took the body of one ready-formed 
In Nature's workshop, but its blood I warmed 

With my own fire. Half of my soul I freed 

To animate the form; the dream, the deed 

That makes man godlike, these from the great void 
I conjured, and my temple veil destroyed 

That he might see the image burn and bleed. 

But when I questioned this created thing. 

There was no voice to answer; for the breath 
Divine I had not given — could not give ! 
Confounded before God, I only bring 
Into creation's hall this masque of death. 

Which wears the mould of life but does not live. 



SPRING-SONG OF THE MINSTREL 

You who are to be my comrade 
Down the wide road of the world, 

Spring is come, with greening banners 
On the loving wind unfurled. 

Though the way ahead is rugged, 
Like all ways that we have trod, 

We will rest us every evening 
In the leafy tents of God. 
50 



We will leave behind life's luggage. 

We shall only need a lyre; 
We will robe ourselves in sunbeams. 

Warm us at the lyric fire. 

Earth's possessions are so heavy, 
They would hinder us, I fear; 

For our feet must walk the rainbow 
As it swerves from sphere to sphere. 

Hark! The dewy dawn is calling 
Us to take the sunward way. 

Forward, singing wild, free music. 
Let us tramp the trail of day. 



THE LOVE OF WOMAN ^ 

Dear, I will stand beside thee to the end. 
Thy loving mate, thy comforter, thy friend. 

If peace and plenitude shall bless thy ways, 
I will enjoy them with thee all my days. 

If shame and sin should be thy bitter lot. 
My faith will cover thee and question not. 

If thou art false to me, then I will say 
Thy spirit fell asleep that cruel day; 

But thou wilt wake, and need my loving care, 
So I will watch with fasting and with prayer, 

51 



THE SLUMBERER 

THOU mysterious One lying asleep 
Within the lonely chamber of my soul! 
Thou art my life's true goal, 

Thine is the only altar that I keep. 
Rapt in the contemplation of thy repose, 

1 see in thy still face that Mystic Rose 
Whose perfume is my soul's imaginings, 
And Beauty at whose awesomeness I weep 
With over-plenitude of ecstasy. 

Thy slumber is the great world-mystery — 

The paradigm of all the latent things 

That in their destined hour Time magnifies 

Its emblems are the intimate hush that lies 

Over the moonlit lake; 

The wonder and the ache 

Of unborn love that trembles in its sleep; 

The hope that thrills the heavy earth 

With presage of becoming, and vast birth; 

The secret of the caverns of the deep. 



THE VIOLIN 

I HOLD between my quivering hands 

A violin new-strung. 
Wrought of a master builder's love 

To be the passionate tongue 
Of the unseen, to utter sounds 

Never on earth yet sung. 
52 



Mute though it lies and musicless, 
My breath across the strings, 

Warm with the love that bares to me 
The mystic soul of things, 

Wakens the slumbering tones and stirs 
Melodious murmurings. 

Dreamy it is with memories 

Of that reborn desire 
That in this fibre buried deep 

The builder's heart of fire. 
O Violin ! the magic bow 

Is all the gods require. 

Out of the silence of your soul 
To smite the rhythmic flame 

Of pain and rapture, and achieve 
The indomitable aim. 

Sounding through all infinity 
The demiurgic Name. 

O Violin, my violin! 

'Tis fateful to command 
The silences to utter sound. 

The wise gods understand 
When I would lift the magic bow 

Why trembles so my hand. 



58 



BY THE SEA " 

Oh, turn your dreamy eyes now to the sea! 
Turn them a moment, dear, away from me 

To where the world, to our self-bounded sight. 
Begins to be. 

We two can see but such a little way! 
Although the sun is bright for us to-day. 

What lies beyond this hour's horizon rim 
We cannot say. 

Perhaps that purple speck against the blue 
May be the mast-head of some ship long due 
From destiny's dim port, with priceless pearls 
For me and you. 

Will we not melt the purest in our wine 
And drink the draught together, for a sign 
Unto the gods of being that their best 
Is yours and mine? 

Or, if the cargo prove but common dust. 
We will accept it, for the stars are just; 

And we will make a road of it, and laugh — 
As brave ones must. 

Dear heart, I have no easy words to say 
The many things that I have felt to-day 
Here by the sea, with destiny and you 
And life at play. 

54 



The sand around us, where to you and me 
The world's self-conscious centre seems to be. 

Is like that far unknown horizon rim 
To those at sea. 

And so this hour that sings itself away 
Was on our life's horizon yesterday. 

Although unknown to us as yonder ship. 
As seeming grey. 

Oh, turn your eyes from the horizon, dear! 

My hands are trembling as the ship draws near. 

Hold them and tell me — Love ! — whether it be 
With hope or fear. 

GOOD-BYE 

Dear, we have made Love's fleeting days 

Bewilderingly sweet, 
But now the world's long, lonely ways 

Yearn for your lingering feet. 

Why do you tarry at the door 

And gaze at me with tears? 
Is it because time holds no more 

Years like our vanished years? 

Your royal gift of self I hold. 

Shrined in my heart and brain; 
The master-secret you have told 

Me, I shall tell again. 
55 



And on that unregarded road 
That you will travel soon, 

The beauty that my love bestowed 
Shall be some pilgrim's boon. 

Justified now by the true past 
And trusting truth to be, 

I yield you to the future's vast 
Inscrutable decree. 



IN THE sours HOUSE 

O BRIGHT-WINGED Lovc, whose ways are mystery. 
Whose hours no man may reckon! I have swept 
And burnished my soul's house, where long I kept 

The body of one dead and hopelessly 

Gazed at the flickering candles ranged by thee 
Around his head and feet. But I who wept. 
Now weep no longer; I who sadly slept 

Under the pall, have burned it and stand free. 

And I have climbed the stairs of the high tower 
That looks upon the sunrise. Robed in white. 

My spirit, ever virgin, waits the hour 

When thou. Love, the dawn-wonder, veiled in light, 

Shalt touch the world and me with quickening power, 

V And drive all dead things down the nether night. 



56 



THE COMING OF LOVE 

I HAVE sought Love all my days; 
Down the world's long dusty ways 
I have listened ifor his footsteps, 
I have sung his praise. 

I have offered in his name 
Peace and solitude and fame 

On my spirit's hidden altar — 
But he never came. 

Sometimes in the tenuous night 
I have felt the still delight 

Of a presence; but it vanished 
With the morning light. 

Till I wearied of the quest. 
Of the yearning in my breast; 

And I whispered to my lone heart_, 
** Let us be at rest: 

" Love's unsullied mystery 
Is not meant for thee and me; 

We are too deep-stained with living — 
It could never be ! " 

Then before I was aware 
Came a breath across my hair, 

While a stillness strange and reverent 
Held the waiting air; 

57 



And my spirit^ strong and sweety 
Rose the long-sought guest to greet, 

Rose — then bent to kiss the garment 
Round his shining feet. 



SONG OF THE MORTAL SUN-BRIDE 

Thou Supreme One, Lord of my Lord, 

Thou who art throned in the centre of each and every 

thing. 
The lights of whose chamber are souls that keep vigil. 
Be merciful unto me in this night of my wakefulness 
And leave me not alone with my own moon-shadow. 

Leave me not alone, or the Dark will lay its hands 
upon me ! 

I would be chaste of the touch of the bands of Dark- 
ness — 

I whom the Lord of Light held as a spouse this day in 
the high noon. 

While Earth lent me the veil of her own bridal. 

And Ocean murmured the benediction of the waters. 

On this night of wonder I would not be alone, O Su- 
preme One! 

For my Lord is away carrying Thy message through the 
regions of the Underworld, 

And when he returns he will bring the morning. 

The Dark and the fear of the Dark will flee before 
him, 

58 



And hide in the cavern of the mountains. 

I shall need no more to cover my head with the veil of 

the illusion of indiiference. 
For the eyes of my Lord have looked into mine in the 

daytime, 
And have found no shame therein. 

Thou who art throned in the centre of each and every 

thing. 
Hide me in the closure of Thy hand until the morning, 
For the eyes of fear are upon me. 
Rememberest Thou the look of my Lord in the hour 

of his beauty. 
When the power of the gods was with him.^* 
Uncovered he was by even a veil of vapour! 
I saw in the face of the western sky the desire of him. 
The Void opened her arms to him. 
Now in the houses of Thine Underworld are many 

dangers. 
And the Dragons of the Zodiac are full of malice. 

Oh, restore to me my Lord, my Beloved ! 

The belt of Orion would be laid aside at Thy bidding; 

Alcyone is a lily in Thy garden; 

The Milky Way is a veil that hides Thy beauty. 

And I? I am bound to the unlit side of one of Thy 

smaller planets, 
I am weak as a blade of grass, my days are drops of 

rain. 



59 



The night is far spent. 

Trembling I turn toward the dark closed tent of the 

East, 
The tent whose floor opens into the future. 
Straining my eyes for the first pale streak of dawn 

under the curtains, 
I wait. . . . 
Will it come like the thin white blade of a sword to 

slay me? 
Will it come like the petal of a blush rose, tremulous, 

pink with unspeakable promise? 



UNDER THE STARS 

Love, you have made me dizzy with your eyes ! 
They are as deep and star-sown as the skies; 
They reach above me in their bourneless blue — 
O high, vast, swimming firmament of You! 
Trembling, I clutch your hand, so sure and strong: 
As one who gazes on the stars too long — 
Till he is dizzy with their awful height 
And the earth's motion through the trackless night 
Clings to the solid ground, and hides his face, 
Lest he be flung into the sea of space. 



60 



THE MAN-CHILD 

O WONDERFUL Small being that my Love 

Made of his dreams before he dreamed of me! 

Trembling I bend above 

Your terrifying softness^ for I see 

Something in you that made the stars afraid 

Before their moons were made. 

Strong is my soul to dare resistant things; 

But with the pressure of your powerless hand 

My will is like a bird with broken wings, 

And all my words are written in the sand. 

And she who bore you is the sacred vase 
That held the wine of Love's high sacrament. 
The still Madonna to whose bower was sent 
The angel of God's grace. 

No other worshipper will come like me, 

man-child! with such offerings for your sake; 
For I know all the secrets of the sea. 

And of men's souls that ache; 

1 know the mystery in women's eyes. 
The mute word never said. 

The laws that are the wonder of the wise, 
And why they smile so strangely who are dead. 



61 



SAPPHICS 

Aphrodite, lady of Love, O hear me! 
I have sung thy praises the heavy day long; 
Now at nightfall, sorrowing still, my heart bows 
Humbly before thee. 

Pity thou me, lonely without the garden 
Where the rose blooms; mad for the beauty somewhere 
Hidden from me, under the veil of twilight 
Wonder and shadow. 

Let me drink deep, deep of the dew that lies cool 
On the young flower! Give me, O Aphrodite! 
Dew for Love's thirst, nectar of night to ease this 
Fever that burns me. 

Give me Love's dark rose of divine caresses — 
Rose of deep curled petals the day has known not, 
Passion's own flower, woven of dream and perfume, 
Ardour and anguish. 

Thine are strange ways, pitiless Aphrodite! 
Lone, denied love, weeping I go with mute lips 
Where the night-blind, merciful waters will not 
Know nor deny me. 



62 



OUTSIDE 

Take me again to the house of thy heart, Beloved! 
Here in the outer world there is rain and thunder, 
Dragons of unbelief and the formless terror. 

Over the earth-face clings the night like a wet veil; 

Down from the mountain comes the wail of the wild 
things. 

Up from the ocean the scream of the wind-blown sea- 
mew. 

I am alone with the night and the rain is upon me, — 
Nothing to cover my head but a beggar's garment. 
Take me again to the house of thy heart, Beloved! 



AN EPISTLE 

You, too near me for grievance or pardon, 
Nearer than pride, dearer than power. 

Oh! could you not, while I prayed in the garden, 
Watch with my soul one hour? 

Out where the blossom of life uncloses. 

You and I on the path of Love 
Walked in his wistful moon of roses. 

One with the bloom thereof. 



You in your soul did the dream uncover, 
Reading the stars like a master of fate — 

You the indomitable lover 
Daring to call me mate! 

Never since Time for a bridal token 
Gave to the moon the reins of the sea, 

Man to woman such word has spoken, 
Love, as you spoke to me. 

How could I know that the book of sorrow, 
Blotted with tears by the ages shed, 

Charged to my score for a stern to-morrow 
Every word you said? 

I was a pilgrim, a lyric dreamer. 

Seeking the Grail round the sceptical earth; 
You were my fiery faith's redeemer. 

Lighting the cold grey dearth. 

Oh ! when the eyes of the stranger signed you. 
Though I had lingered so long away. 

Came no wraith of the past to remind you 
I should return some day? 

Never since earth's remote beginning 

Two moons hung in a dual sky; 
Never two spinners were one thread spinning 

But one spun awry. 



64 



Though the desired sun knows all places^ 
One line only his noon-rays mark; 

Only one hemisphere he faces, 
Leaving the other dark. 

Love^ when the waxing moon is rounded 
I and my songs in your arms will sink. 

Even now is the draught compounded 
Our two mouths shall drink. 

What of the veil of alien kisses, 

Passionate hours and dreams and sighs, — 
Veil of unendurable blisses 

Now drawn over your eyes.^ 

Once your eyes were wells untroubled, 
Calm as the infinite Question of space: 

Gazing deep, I beheld there doubled 
Only my own rapt face. 

Oh! shall I turn from the wells though clouded. 
Missing the verity hid in the wrong, — 

Turn with my pain and passion shrouded 
Under the sleeve of song.^ 

Nay, I will drink of the mingled waters, 
Bitter-sweet though the drinking be. 

Even as the pale wise merman's daughters 
Drink the salt sweet sea. 



65 



Then shall I know the power that humbles. 
Feel the compassionate touch that heals, 

See how the Self's thin mirror crumbles 
Under Life's vast wheels. 

Then shall I know the hidden places. 
Turn the great last leaves of the Book, 

Read the wonder in women's faces 
Where God dares not look. 



THE ANGEL 

God sent an angel down to me, 

A sweet and shining one. 
With deep eyes veiled in mystery 

And garments like the sun; 
And in its open hand the key 

No lone soul ever won. 

I heard it singing down the sky 

Before I saw its face; 
I listened, and I wondered why 

My life's familiar place 
Seemed new with wonder, like a high 

Mountain awash with space. 

It came and touched me with its hand, 
And kissed me on the brow. 

And told me of a fabled land 
Far off, and whispered now 



Things that I feared to understand — 
A message and a vow. 

And I was frightened by its power, 

And anguished with its pain; 
And all its beauty seemed the dower 

Of my bewildered brain; 
And I was eager for the hour 

The angel should be slain. 

But they are strong, the shining ones 

Who house behind the stars, 
And run wild races round the suns. 

And bend the rainbow's bars. 
And bring to grieve the moon's white nuns 

Red messages from Mars. 

I, too, am strong, and in affright 

Because it seems so fair, 
I find its throbbing throat, dream-white, 

And clutch my fingers there. 
And through the long, warm, moon-mad night 

I slay it with despair. 

And though it struggles in my hold. 

And strives to kiss the hand 
That strangles it, and turns me cold 

With tender fire — the sand 
Of Time falls fast, and I am bold — 

But do not understand. 



67 



For I know not — Ah, woe is me ! — 
Whether I do right well, 

And save me from the agony- 
No woman's lips may tell. 

Or if I stand a moment free — 
But doom my soul to hell. 



TO THE UNKNOWN LOVE 

Slowly the seasons come and go, 

And we are still apart! 
We know not each the other's face. 

Though deep in the lone heart 
Burns evermore the flame of hope — 

The fever and the smart. 

Sometimes within the nether mind 

Vague memories arise 
Of other times and other climes. 

Of lips and brow and eyes. 
Sometimes it seems the murmuring breeze 

Is heavy with your sighs. 

I hear your voice whenever a bird 
Pours out its wild love song. 

And in the moaning of the sea 
When nights are drear and long. 

My eyes look restlessly for yours 
Through every passing throng. 
68 



Somewhere you lie alone to-night. 

Calling me wistfully. 
Oh, that the earthly veil might fall 

And let the spirit see! 
It may be only yonder wall 

Separates you and me. 



THE LONELY QUEST 

Long did my soul interrogate the stars. 
For news of one remembered from a day 
When earth and I were younger. A great way 

We walked together, then the iron bars 

Of God divided us. I bear the scars 

Of lonely lives, of lonely loves; the spray 

Of doubt has drenched my faith, but could not stay 

My quest through all Time's changing calendars. 

And last night when I walked where angels call 
Softly to one another round the white 

Circle of heaven, I found him once again, — 
Found him a watcher on the Guardian Wall, 
A torch of sacrifice, a nameless light 

For the dark wilderness of mortal pain. 



69 



SALUTATION TO THE LORD OF LOVE 

Thou who art Master of Life and of Death and of 
Time, I salute thee! 

Thine are the unknown ways and the soul's hid pur- 
pose forever. 

Under thy feet is the orbit of earth, and thy rhyth- 
mical breathing 

Blows the worlds through the void and the stars on 
their weariless journey. 

Thee I salute! Thou art fairer than youth in the 

morn, my Beloved, — 
Source of the morn and youth; and the years are but 

motes in the sunbeam 
Thine eyes cast on the wind-swept ocean of Time. 

By thy footsteps 
Aeon on aeon is measured, and thine is the gauge of a 

moth's life. 

Thine is the gauge of the soul; and my song, and my 

love, and my love's pain 
Mingle as atoms of sand on the shores of the sea of 

thy being. 
Thee I salute ! I, less than obedient dust in thy service, 
Now am chosen, exalted high as the gods in thy favour. 

Why is the marvel. Beloved? How do I merit the 

jewel 
Hung by thy hand on my neck? In the night of my 

need I besought thee, 

70 



Praying the boon of the mere stones pressed by thy 

feet on the highway — 
Only the stones of the road. Thou hast flung me the 

stars for my wearing! 

Even in childhood's days I, singled out for thy blessing, 
Saw unveiled that Beauty which moves on the surface 

of all things. 
Saw revealed that quivering Wonder that hides in the 

shadow ; 
Aye, thou hast sounded the Word of original speech in 

my hearing. 

These were as nothing, Beloved! Only to-day have I 
taken 

Time by the hand, strong Love by the lips, great Life 
by his breathing; 

Now with Time I am one, and with Love, and with 
Life and the whole world. 

Thee I salute, O Beloved, here at the hem of thy gar- 
ment! 

Lo, as a friend I behold thee, entering the door of my 

dwelling 
Robed in thy mantle of splendour — Thou the In- 

spirer, the Unknown ! — 
Reaching to touch my soul with the torch that enkindles 

the ages. 
Lighting the fire on my altar, the yearning that knows 

no abatement. 



71 



THE WAY / 



It is no smooth and daisy-spangled way 

That my soul's feet have travelled. They that go 
Always upon the safe path never know 

The wider wisdom we who go astray 

Learn of the gods that guide us. We must slay 
Dragons at every turn; but they bestow 
Their powers upon their conquerors, and we grow 

Richer for every forfeit that we pay. 

I walked with Toil and Dream and Love and Hate, 
Who all their hidden lore to me confessed: 

No staff had 1, nor scrip to deal with Fate, 
Only the lamp of faith to light my quest; 

But when I stood before the goal's high gate, 
'Twas opened wide, as for a royal guest. 



72 



Ill 

AZELON 



AZELON 

AzELON^ I wonder why 

Your smile should make the planet shake! 
I wonder why your voice should make 
The stars so dizzy in the sky. 

1 wonder why until the dawn 

I cannot find the gate of sleep, 
And dreams go by like frightened sheep, 
Seeking the fold of Azelon. 

I wonder how the thought of you, 

Once pale as the first green of spring, 
Has grown to cover everything. 

With hopes like Mayflowers shining through. 

When I confer with Destiny 
The Moon is mj^' astrologer, 
Because I heard you speak to her 

One midnight when you walked with me. 

I question every daisy bed 

For omens — but they answer not. 
The very Spring is in a plot 

To snarl my heart's bewildered thread. 

The violet hints your eyes are blue. 
And laughs — my query to evade. 
'Tis strange, you make me so afraid, 

I never dare to look at you! 

75 



Azelon^ my cheek is pale! 

The season's footsteps are so slow! 
A rose may half forget to blow 
In listening for the nightingale. 

Some day, when you are passing by, 
If I should dare to drop one sweet 
Shy pale pink rose-leaf at your feet 

1 wonder would you question why! 



FAR AWAY 

If you should come and stand in yonder door 

And look at me, I would not feel surprise; 

For I have grown familiar with your eyes 
In dreaming of you. All day long I pore 
Over that volume of unwritten lore — 

The words you might have said, the smiles, the sighs 

That wild imagination prophesies 
When we come face to face, as heretofore. 

Yet if a letter came for me io-day 

In your strange writing, I should tremble so 
The very messenger, I think, would know 

Something my soul is yet afraid to say 

Even in the dark, when tossing to and fro 

I seek the path of sleep, and lose my way. 



76 



IN MAY 

Sometimes a fear blows cold upon my heart 
That we may come no nearer, after all; 
And then the grey November shadows fall 

Over the green May meadows. Many start 

Upon the way of Love, only to part 

At the first cross-roads; and the buds are small 
Upon Love's apple-trees — Oh, very small ! — 

And ripening days are distant as tliou art. 

But when at night on each celestial bough 
I watch the sweet star-blossoms one by one 
Unfold their shining leaves, the morrow's sun 

Rising at dawn seems no more sure than thou; 
And my soul's timid, silent orison 

Is answered by thy soul's unworded vow. 



PERVASION 

You are all vague and haunting things to me. 
The shimmer of the moonlight on the mere 
Is your strange being, and the brooding fear 

Of the black midnight. Everywhere I see 

A symbol of you; in the cedar tree 

That dreams beside my window, in the clear 
Eyes of the lonely stars, in the austere 

And melancholy ocean's mystery. 

77 



Never the moon beholds my secret hours 
But you behold me, never the grey dawn 
Comes without word of you on its cool breath. 
And will I feel you in my coffin flowers, 
When over Time's cold borders I am drawn 
By the inexorable desires of Death? 



SHADOW-LOVE 

Dear, do you wonder when I turn away 

Sometimes without a word? 'Tis lest you know 
The frightened secret I have guarded so ! 

When you are gentlest, then a wild dismay 

Blows round my soul's frail dwelling, and I stay 
Far from the windows. Only when you go 
And leave me alone with Love does the flame glow 

White on the midnight altar where I pray. 

How strange it is that I who fear your eyes 

Fear not your soul! for through the grove of dreams 
I walk with you unveiled and unafraid 
In spirit converse. But the dawn denies 
Faith to the man and woman, nor redeems 
One lovely pledge the daring shadows made. 



78 



OLD SONGS 

To-day I read some strange old songs of yours, 

Sung to another woman long ago. 

Love, I am glad ! for now I know. ... I know 
That you can love, and the wild knowledge cures 
My deepest pahi of all. Passion endures: 

A blade well tempered in the furnace glow 

Never grows brittle, but endures the snow. 
The ice, the night of boreal temperatures. 

I bless her, that veiled woman of the past, 
I pledge her beauty in my soul's red wine. 

She surely is less than I, for I am last. . . . 
Mine is the future. And her star shall shine 

High in my firmament, immortal, vast. . . . 
For I am Woman, and the songs are mine. 



LOVE-GLANCE 

Last night I saw a look in your strange eyes - 
A light — a something that half blinded me. 
So like it was to the sudden ecstasy 

Of waking love, which starts in sweet surprise 

That dawn is at the window. . . • But too wise. 
Too wise am I in secret tears to see 
The sun at midnight, or a prophecy 

Of joy in any star in your dark skies! 



79 



And yet . . . great Athon gazed at me just so. 

The night he made his holy vows a stair 
For me to climb by. . . . But my brain says no: 

The veriest pagan may recite a prayer 
To his own god before Christ's image. Go 

Thy lone strong way, my heart. Beware, 
beware ! 



THE SUBSTANCE AND THE SHADOW 

Why is your sadness sweeter than all song, 
And the cold clasp of your mysterious hands 
More warming than the fire? Ghosts of far lands 

And lives unnumbered at your coming throng 

The chambers of my house, and in the long 

Hours of your absence your still wraith demands 
More than your presence dares — and understands 

The weakness of my heart you deem so- strong. 

Until I fear some day I may mistake 

The substance for the shadow, and reveal 
All that I tremble now lest you surmise. 
Wary my heart must be, for pride's cold sake; 
And lest you be an infidel, conceal 

With painted screens the door of paradise. 



80 



THE BECKONER 

One day a vision came and beckoned me 
Out of the still grey halls where solitude 
Waits for the guest whose coming must elude 

The mocking eyes of Life and Destiny. 

I followed, and the vision bade me see 

The garden of dreams whose lilies never die, 
The rainbow of Love's promise in the sky, 

The arbour of faith whose walls are mystery. 

Breathless I cried, "Who art thou?" And he said, 
" My name is Might Have Been, I am accurst 
By all men, but my boons shall make thee strong 
Take on thy lids my chrism of tears unshed. 
My bitter wine of knowledge for thy thirst. 
And for thy breast the barren rose of song.'* 



THE GATE 

You are the gate of that walled paradise 
That I can never enter, and your word 
Is like the angel of the flaming sword 

That turns all ways. Beloved, I am wise — 

Not from the tree of knowledge, but your eyes; 
And sad with all the meanings underscored 
In God's great book of Passion. . . . Dream adored! 
adored ! 

I slay it daily, but it never dies. 

81 



You are the gate behind whose iron bars 
The rose of life is red, and in the dusk 
The angel walks among the waving grain. 
I walk outside, beneath the shivering stars; 
My only harvest is the empty husk. 
My only flower the lily of white pain. 



THE SECRET JEWELS 

Oh, little do you know how rich you are 
In priceless jewels! I have given you 
Thousands of pearls, my tears, all pure and new 

From the deep seas of sorrow; a great bar 

Of rubies for your sword — not rained afar. 

But my heart's blood drops; opals of strange hue 
My moonlight dreams that never will come true; 

And crowning all, my faith — a diamond star. 

But these rich gifts I bring you secretly. 
Hiding them in the dark and silent ground 
Beside your door; for I could never bear 
That you should know how you impoverish me. 
Could not endure that when the gems are found 
You gaze at me in wonder — and not care ! 



82 



WHEN WE ARE OLD 

My friend, when you and I are very old. 
And meet each other after many years, 
And sit together by the fire, that cheers 

Those shivering ones whose love-fires have grown cold; 

Then maybe I will say to you: " Behold 

These sweet song-flowers I watered with my tears 
When I was fresh as they; my woman-fears 

Hid them till beckoning Death had made me bold." 

And lying all alone in the dark night, 

You will remember that my mouth was red. 
My hand was warm, my shoulder smooth and white; 
Remember and weep the love you never gave. 
And toss till daylight on your dreamless bed. 
And shudder - — thinking of the lonely grave. 



SIC TRANSIT GLORIA MUNDI 

With you pass all the glories of the hills, 

Green with the dream and promise of the spring. 
The robin leaves on chill autumnal wing 

My budding Northland, and the hidden rills 
Shudder as in November. The wood stills 
Her breath to listen for you, who now sing 
No more about her chambers. Everything 

Beautiful passes with you, and vague ills 

Whisper together hoarsely just outside 

83 



The door of life. . . . O Love! the clouds can tell 
In sobbing rain their heaviness, the tide 

Rises with word of power; but I who dwell 
Between the granite walls of pain and pride. 

With never a tear endure the great farewell. 



PASSION SEEDS 

*Tis sweeter far to gaze in your soft eyes 
One little moment, without word or touch. 
Than any love-embrace I ever knew. 

Your breath the other night upon a book 
We read together, fluttered a loose page — 
And my soul shivered like a willow-leaf. 

What mystic counsel did your mother hold 

With God, ten moons ere ever you were born. 

That you should wear the rainbow round your head? 

Here is a riddle for the dual Sphinx: 

When you are far away — you seem so near; 

When you are near — you seem so far away. 

Until I loved you. Dear, I never knew 
How sad the eyes one passes in the street. 
How still the world an hour before the dawn. 



84 



If you should die and learn my guarded love, 
Then would I burn a lamp till the sun rose — 
Fearing to face your spirit in the dark! 

Your letters. Dear, are like the gentle winds 
That make the grey woods weep, on some soft day 
In winter when the boughs are bare of leaves. 

To-day I heard a wandering harp-player 
Under my window, and in every tone 
The words of love that you will never say. 

If I could dip my pen in your red blood. 

Then would I write such songs — such passion songs 

That even you would wonder whom I loved. 

The schools of all the world could not have taught 
So deep a knowledge as my soul has learned 
In the stern college of your calm regard. 

How strange that I, who have explored far seas. 
Charting new islands on the map of Love, 
Should steer my boat upon this jagged reef! 

Your lip is like a petal of that rose 

That blossomed in the shadow of the Cross — 

Red as the mystic flower of Golgotha. 

How many hopeless lovers must have died. 
Hiding in guarded shrines their sacred fire. 
Ere Sappho wept for Phaon in old days! 

85 



Maybe some lonely heart in unborn years 

Will bless your coldness: Had you given me love, 

I had made songs for you — but not these songs. 

Your shadow on the granite wall of pain 
Has shown me more of beauty than the full 
Sunlight in all the rose-bowers of the world. 

What matter though the iron doors of Fate 

Part us forever? Love is everywhere. 

And you are mine — though I am never yours. 

I never knew how chaste my spirit was 

Till I touched you: Love's scarlet flame is mild, 

But his crucible is whiter than blown snow. 

I saw a man and woman with a child, 
Happy together . . . and I stole away 
Among the shadows of the lonely woods. 

Your praises of my songs are like the dole 
Given a minstrel who in silence knows 
He is the secret first-born of the King. 



•&• 



I dread to see the blossoms of the spring: 

The violet, the white lily and the rose. 

Will haunt me with your eyes, your brow, your mouth. 

Before I saw your face, I always wondered 
Why the blue moonlight, and the moaning sea. 
And the grey davm, had filled my soul with tears. 

86 



y 



" I care no more/' I said, and lightly sang. 
And then I saw you passing in the street. . . . 
And I was very still, and sang no more. 

If you should ever understand and say, 

" Take all I have, though less than your long love," 

Then would I smile — but go far off from you. 

Only from you to me the Love Supreme 
Or nothing — as that rebel archangel 
Chose hell to standing second before God. 

Your boon of thorns is my immortal wreath; 
And save for you I never could have known 
How One so loved the world — that loved him not ! 



THE STILLBORN 

The burden of my love for thee has grown 
Intolerable; 'tis heavy as a child 
Under my heart, and struggles to be born. 
Long have I borne it in my burning womb 
Hidden from all; have laughed and gone my way 
Among the virgins. . . . But my hour is come. 
My mantle of indifference grows too narrow 
Longer to screen my secret, and I creep 
Into the lonely garden of confession 
Under the stars; no lesser eyes should see 
The weakness of my tears. The stars are old, 

87 



And some bear women's names. Surely the stars 
Will understand; surely they will not chide. 
Nor shame me with cheap pity, who am strong 
And ask no pity of the stars or gods. 

How long ago it seems, that winter night 
When in a sudden rapture the small seed 
That now has grown so mighty, fixed itself 
Deep in the soil of my being! I have seen 
Since then the snow upon the rolling fields 
Make way for the daisy, I have seen the rose 
Blossom and fade, the busy harvesters 
Gathering the grain. Now in a little while 
Shall I behold something the dews of night 
Will warm their liquid hearts to He upon. 

Let me not cry aloud, remembering 
All things are born in pain; remembering 
That every pain shall pass and be no more 
Even a memory. Had not yonder plain 
Pangs poignant as a woman's in giving birth 
To the blue mountain? Are not master-songs 
Born of the poet's travail and his tears .^^ 
Let me not cry aloud ! Had my own mother 
Never known pain, I never had known song. 
And the green world had never known of me. 

A little while and I shall understand 
More than Minerva, answer the great question 
That graved the wrinkles on the Sphinx's brow. 
Only a little while and I shall look 

88 



Love in the face — if it be not born dead. 
Having endured too deep prenatal grief. 
Shall I be frightened when I feel its breath, 
Knowing the woe that waits all breathing things? 

Much have I sung of Love in other days. 
When I have walked with Joy in the high hills. 
Careless and free. Having beheld its face, 
Shall I pass awed and silent down the years, 
Hushed with a knowledge beyond joy and song? 



THE INTERVENER 

I LEANED entranced upon a flowery gate. 
When a stern figure faced me in disguise. 

I thought it was the iron hand of Fate 

That turned me from that poppied paradise; 

But gazing up, with stifled word of hate, 
I saw instead — my Guardian Angel's eyes! 



89 



IV 

THE HUMAN MIRROR 
A Rhapsody 



THE HUMAN MIRROR 

A Rhapsody 

I 

Beloved, all the beauty and the dream 

That trembled into being from the dark, 

When God's original creative spark 

Went singing through the void of the Supreme^ 

Thou dost reflect for me 

In the effulgent mirror of thy form. 

Everywhere on thy warm 

And glimmering surface beckons visibly 

The wraith of that divine and mystic key 

That can unlock the double-doors of Being. 

Thy semblances are symbols in my sight 

Of that Reality beyond our seeing, 

Whose shadows are our glimpses of the Light. 

Oh, that thine eyes could see 
The epiphany thou art! 

Love's vision has unveiled the moving mirror^ 
And in thy clear reflection shown to me 
Him, thy great archetypal counterpart — 
Creator and Preserver and Destroyer — 
Whose breath brings forth the whirling universe. 
And whose inbreathing draws it back again. 
In the dark Sea of Silence to immerse 
The links of Time's long chain. 

93 



All forms lie only half-cancealed in thee; 
The curve that hints the circle hidden, the line 
Straight as an arrow from Creation's bow, 
The pentacle, the trine. 
The royal square, the demiurgic sign, — 
These are the symbols of thy sovereignty. 
Magi of Love, they will reveal to me 
The mysteries they know. 

Thy kisses are the very potency 

Of the immortal Breath, 

A whisper on the winds of ecstasy 

Blown from the green fields beyond life and death. 

My fluid soul that presses quivering 

The shores of Being at the touch of thee, 

Is one drop of that primal, spatial sea 

Thrilled by the vibrant touch of God to sing 

The passion-song whose notes are stars and prayers; 

And in the rush of joy my spirit dares 

The rhythm of that planetary music. 

O thou star-wanderer! 

Would that I knew the tenuous winding way 
Thou hast ascended through our terrene clay 
The seven stairs of Life — 
The toil, the unimaginable strife! 
Aye, or that other longer, stranger road. 
Whose deep declivities are gods and seons. 
The road of thine original descent 
From Him, the Immanent, 
The One, the Inconceivable Abode. 

94 



Thine every footstep seems 
To hint of ways whose chart He only hath; 
Infinite must have been thy days^ thy dreams. 
Thy converse on the path. 

Son of the Presence, 

The boundaries of thine inheritance 

Are one with thy great Sire's divine romance. 

Thine are the potencies of endless life. 

And on thy lips is that unchanging word 

Whose lingering cadence every age has heard. 

In thee are all the pictures of the past. 

The shadowed wraith of everything that is. 

The seeds of all realities to be. 

Unseen they lie, in silent companies. 

Waiting my touch that irresistibly 

Calls them to manifest their forms to me. 

Even reminders of ancestral wrong 

Survdve in these fond arms wherein I rest — 

The powers at whose behest 

The ages made me weak, and made thee strong; 

But I forgive and love like all those women 

Whose lives are the background of my palimpsest. 

And over their dead story I grave my song. 

Revealed in thee, bards of the unborn days — 
Their foreheads honoured with prophetic bays 
The seeds of whose home trees have yet to climb 
Through the cold soil of time — 
Urge me to give my songs to pave the ways 
Their unshod feet must travel. 

95 



II 



Thy body, my Beloved, is to me 

The alphabet of Life's deep mystery; 

By it my soul can falteringly spell 

The hidden story of humanity, 

And all its perilous future paths foretell. 

O miracle of form! 

O ecstasy of spiritual line, 

Where human sight is lost in the divine! 

Dizzy with adoration I have lain 

In the rapt stillness of the summer night. 

Companioned by the intimate sweet moon, 

Gazing at thee — until the sheer delight 

Of vision grew bewildered, even to pain. 

Losing itself in swoon. 

The mould wherein thy wonder-breathing flesh — 
Young and so flower- fresh — 
Was wrought but yesterday of joyous clay. 
Is older than the memory of thy race. 
It has persisted with thee, birth by birth. 
Since that self-confident day 
In the triumphant springtime of the earth. 
When the strong groping spirit of Man first uttered 
That ritual of his immortality. 
Varied by destiny, desire and time. 
Experience and clime. 

The shadows thine enduring form has cast 
Upon the mirror of mortality — 
Their little, gesturing, vivid hour to last — 

96 



Have one by one passed irretrievably 

Into the dark enclosing frame of the grave. 

But still the Uncreated waits in thee, 

Urging — through mazes where no mind can trace 

The utter diffusion of Its unity — 

Eager reincarnations of thy race. 



Ill 



Oh, that my questing soul could understand 

This mystery of Life that hides in thee ! 

I read no message of Infinity 

In the star-mirroring, stupendous sea. 

So potent to inspire 

Even as one small motion of Love*s hand. 

O golden life of spirit, dream and fire. 

Compounded in the cabinet of birth! 

Art thou my Love's, prisoned by his desire 

Within his house of sublimated earth? 

Or, art thou in thyself that ambushed Thing, 

Wliose intricacies of doom 

Astound the figures of man's reckoning? 

Maybe thou art the Master of the loom. 
Stronger than Time, inscrutable as Fate, — 
The Weaver who by devious delays 
Held the gold threads that are my Lover's days 
Suspended in the air. 
Until it served thy purposes to fill 
The tiny but inevitable square 
Sacred to him, his own predestined part 

97 



In the grand pattern of Kabalistic skill — 
The human fabric of thine awful art. 

What is that life, Beloved, that I feel 

Vibrant, self-conscious, in each atom of thee? 

By aid of Love's white magic I would steal 

The veil which hides that habitant from me, 

Baring the jealous beautiful strange face 

Science may not uncover — 

The face of Life itself, therein to trace 

The mystery of my Lover. — 

Could I unveil its wrappings, could I see 

That unit of untiring energy 

Which animates thy fervid, throbbing clay, 

I, though a time-bound mortal, might arouse 

Visions, long-slumbering, of Creation's Day; 

I might behold the eyes of Him whose spouse 

Was the great Paradigm- — 

Mother of Form, of Motion, and of Time — 

Whose memory endows 

The forms of earth with their bewildering beauty 



IV 



The soft rose-lining of thy human veil 
Is the soul-essence of that crimson hue 
The gods know as desire; 
Chastened it was in that creative fire 
Which left thy gleaming surface ivory-pale, 
Unshaded by the dust whereof it grew. 
Thy devious veins whose deep blue courses seem 

98 



Mysterious hieroglyphs all over thee. 

Are secret rivers of Infinity, 

Rolling their pulsing ways through meadows of dream 

Down to the mystic sea. 

The restless sea whose tides are life and death. 

Oh, that the river's flood might cover me! 

That I might breathe no longer my own breath 

In this cold isolate austerity 

Of life outside of thee ! 

Love, let me feel the divine ravishment 

Of thy deep veins' inviolate content. 

The beating of thy heart is to my ears 

The rhythm of the sacramental mass 

Sung by the vested years. 

As one by one with measured steps they pass 

In rapt procession round the reverent spheres. 

That superhuman music moves my soul 

Even as the wind's wild music moves the sea. 

While under and around and over me 

Thy heartbeats sound their mighty organ roll. 



Pulsing and luminous, the fringe of light 
Around thy form is visible to me 
In the dark night. 
In that ellipse I see 

The orbits of the world of pain and pleasure, 
That round thy heliocentric heart, my Love, 
Tread their melodious measure, 
Like to the ether-wandering worlds above. 

99 



What draws the glory of thine aureole 

I know not, save it be 

The fierce attraction of the cosmic Soul. 

Its oscillation blinds and dazes me: 

It rises from thee like the shimmering heat 

From metal in the sunlight, when the wheat 

Ripens, and meadow-lands exude 

Their second plenitude. 

Is this the fiery essence of thy being, 

That at the stations of its outward course 

Calls to its flaming source? 

These mysteries of light which beckoned so 

That I bound on my sandals for the quest. 

Challenge me now, and would my steps arrest. 

Raising a warning finger lest I go 

Even to the cave of the Unmanifest 

That brooks no mortal guest. 

Yet strange things do I see recorded here 

In this thy Soul's symbolic atmosphere: 

Outlines of lands, remembered mistily. 

Where I have walked with thee 

In lanes of love, or other paths austere. 

In thy far wanderings through realms unknown, 
When in the night alone 
With the wise ancient retrospective sea, 
Have not vague memories come and questioned thee 
Of bygone days with me? 

When thou hast heard the moon-mad nightingale's 
Lyrical wooing of his love, the rose, — 
Whose answering sweetness to his passion flows 

100 



In yearning fragrance through her filmy veils, — 

Hast thou not felt the haunting atmosphere 

Of something lost, yet memorably dear? 

Has not a deep, oppressive emptiness 

Cried in thy heartache for a happiness 

Whose lovely name even thou couldst not guess — 

Being the speech of some forgotten sphere? 

On Thought's horizon I have caught the gleam 
Of setting stars, through memory's twilight haze. 
And known them for the ghosts of other days. 
When thou and I together, my Beloved, 
Dreamed the sweet human dream: 
These phantoms walk with thee in all thy ways. 
The perfume of thy passion-shadowed hair 
Is heavy with the mystery and the prayer 
That brooded over Asia in old time. 
Thine eyes have the deep meditative calm 
Of India in her prime. 

Pure with the peace of the eternal Brahm. 
Thine eyebrow's dusky line 
Is hieroglyphic, an ideal sign 
Occult with ancient meanings, but half hid. 
Of Sphinx and pyramid. 
Every reflection on thy mirror cast 
Is teeming with the spectres of the past. 
In what dim dawn of elemental dream 
Did thy first vibrant image agitate 
The tenuous substance of the shadowland? 
The far events these glyphs commemorate. 
My dust-blind spirit may not understand. 

101 



VI 



Turn to me, Love, thy sweet, reflective eyes ! 

What beauty-curtained thoughts convene behind 

Their windows in the chamber of thy mind ? — 

The secret chamber to which God denies 

That even I should any entrance find. 

Hurling the atoms of Himself apart, 

Did our primordial Projector fear 

That in our gravitation back again. 

Proclivity might carry us too near — 

One to another yearning passionately — 

Making his purpose plain 

Before the destined hour of Unity? 

And, fearing so, did He reserve the mind. 

That one inviolate and lonely centre 

Even Love may not enter? 

Yet often, my Beloved, I have caught 

Etheric intimations of thy thought, 

When hands and lipsi and eyes were motionless. 

Guided by these, my hopes have dared to guess 

Some hidden entrance that would yield to me, 

Could I but find the key. 

It is a master-workshop, and a temple. 
That Nature-guarded chamber of thy thought. 
There in seclusion potent things are wrought. 
And potent worship offered to the Light 
By day and night. 
There as the solar periods go by. 
The resolute magician dares alone 

102 



The demon legions of the magic zone — 
Phantasmal forms that seek to terrify- 
Even the valiant ones at whose behest 
The veil is raised that guards the great Unknown. 

Thy sovereign will is that arch alchemist 
Whose power no spirit can utterly resist. 
Held in its crucible, Life's baser things 
Are melted into Beauty's virgin gold: 
'Motives of men, their rhythms manifold, 
Their fierce desires, their dreams and falterings, 
All are transmuted by that master bold, 
Through Love — the universal alkahest 
Of the magician's quest. 

Lone, and besieged forever by the rout 
Of the unhallowed sons of Fear and Doubt, 
The patient worker that abides in thee — 
Shaping new beauties for eternity — 
Shall be the prophet of a purer art. 
Thou Poet of my heart! 



VII 

The reverent soul in me 
Would swing Love's sacred censer silently 
Before that altar where the soul in thee- 
Pure as a flower to heaven looking up — 
Burns in its golden cup. 

103 



Thy spirit is a lamp to light my way 

Through the bewildering mazes of the earth. 

Beyond this perilous dearth 

It beckons, and I go no more astray 

After the ignis fatuus of fame. 

Nor pleasure's wavering flame. 

That love-trimmed, faith-filled lamp burns steadily, 

Even in the winds of pain it flickers not. 

Signal divine of God, it marks for me 

The destined earthly spot 

Where for my wind-blown soul passage may be 

To the far calling ocean of unity. 

VIII 

These are the seven jewels the stars intrust 

To the rash keeping of the house of dust: 

Thy form, thy life, thy garment of desire. 

Thy veiled etheric record of the past. 

Thy dual mind — the dream that will not last 

And the immortal vision framed in fire. 

And IT, the golden microcosmic spark 

Of the one Flame whose word awoke the vast 

Of the original dark. 

This house of dust that shelters thee. Beloved, 
This body where thou tarriest a day. 
Is the hall of learning told of by the sages 
Of older, wiser ages. 

That every traveller dwells in on his way. 
Over the sombre walls are gaily spread 

104 



The fabrics of illusion, blue and red, 

Violet, gold, and every lovely hue 

The vreavers knew. 

The jewel of the Great Ensnarer glows 

Temptingly here wherever the light falls. 

And in the dark malevolently glows. 

Never while lingering within these walls 

Hope to enjoy repose. 

Yet in these chambers of illusive grace 

A little while I would abide with thee. 

Till Beauty — thy co-dweller — shows to me 

The wonder of his face. 



IX 



benedicite unutterable! 

1 see thee in the glory of the sun — 
Blindingly beautiful. 

Even in mystic visions there is none 

Comparable with thee when that sovereign light 

Reveals thee so to my interior sight. 

The petals of the rose are not so fresh 

As the blossom of thy flesh. 

Nor is the marble of Pentelicus 

To be compared with thee for gleaming splendour, 

Thou culmination of the marvellous! 

When first I saw thee in the light of the sun, 
A film undreamed of fell from off my eyes; 
Then I beheld what Beauty meant to Him 
Who made it, as His own primeval bride — 

105 



Made it and veiled it even from the wise — 

From all save those whom love had purified. 

But though I had the voice of the seraphim, 

I could not make the blind world realise 

The vision in my eyes. 

Beloved, where the lights and shadows meet 

Along thy sun-illumined form, I see 

Glory liquescent, quivering mystery. 

O wonder from thy forehead to thy feet — 

Wonder of Beauty, by whose ravishment 

Spirit and mind are blent! 

Dazed with infinitude, I lay my face 

In the warm intimate shelter of thy breast; 

But even here the vision finds no rest. 

Here the fond relic of a lost embrace — 

A union riven in some forgotten storm — 

Whispers imagination of a time 

When we were one, even in outer form; 

And this sweet useless remnant yet survives 

To explain the yearning of our separate lives. 



I hold thy lovely head between my hands. 
With fingers buried in thy clinging hair. — 
O maze, whose mystery is my despair! 
Symbol whose meaning no man understands! 
Art thou an emanation and a glory 
Of the indwelling spiritual fire, 
A million-threaded lyre 

106 



iMusical with the immemorial story 

Of bodiless desire ? — 

The whisper of thy locks across my face 

Is like the quick embrace 

Of a passing spirit in the startled air, 

Potent as faith and passionate as prayer. 



XI 



O benedictive hands, that hold for me 

Divine response to all my orisons ! 

Ye are the same that down the past I see 

Wildly uplifted to the deity 

Of prehistoric suns. 

The lonely dream whose destiny was man. 

Yearning to reach and take 

The blessed something of his dumb desire. 

Performed the miracle — and so began 

Beautiful hands, like these of Love's, that make 

Such complicated music on the lyre 

Of my imagination. 

Wonderful are these nails, the boundary 
Of thine extension in the outer vast: 
Curled rose leaves, that some danger of the past, 
Some ancient cruelty. 
Petrified in their fragrant loveliness?. 
But mindful of the garden of delight 
Where first they bloomed, they spring as readily 
To the clutch of Love's invincible caress. 
As to the sterner fierceness of the fight. 

J107 



XII 



I gaze into the dark dream of thine eyes, 

Deep and bewildering as etheric space — 

The night-veil of the skies 

Wherein God hides His unendurable beauty. 

Only revealing in the points of light 

Glimpses of His inviolable grace 

Subdued for human sight. 

O visual spheres_, to whose formation went 

The very essence and the potency 

Shrined in each element ! 

In you the dust of earth is most divine. 

And the uncertain substance of the sea 

Held for a vast design 

So marvellous that man might almost fear it: 

The revelation to the prisoned one — 

The lonely, earth-bound spirit — 

Of that material, cosmic tapestry 

Woven of stars and earth and air and sea. 

For this the patient watchman of the Sun, 

Sleepless through ages in Time's wilderness. 

Has burned his mighty lamp that men might guess. 

Seeing the web, the purpose of the Weaver. 

Through the occult dark centres of thine eyes 
God looks at me. 
O gaze that terrifies ! 
O loving, brooding Dweller that is God! 
In those impenetrable deeps I see 
The clear, transcendent Question looking out 

108 



Into this world of Doubt; 

A separate Something, dwelling there alone. 

Guarding a hidden purpose of its own. 

Through what long changes in the forms of things 
Hast thou, indwelling Wonder, found thy way- 
Triumphing through the ever-lightening rings. 
From thy first blind desire to the outer day? 
iEons have passed thee, stumbling in the dark! 
Thy passage left a mark 
In the soft substance of eternity 
That only God could see. 
How lonely and bewildered was thy going! 
The whole blind length of solitude thy way 
Led, and the width of pain. 
The height and depth of yearning and dismay. 
Then in a dream thy vision, lightning-taught. 
Leaped through unknown dimensions of the brain. 
And the miracle was wrought. 
All this I read. Beloved, in the wise 
Deep volume of thine eyes. 

XIII 

Last night I whispered in the noiseless dark 
A message from my spirit unto thine; 
Then in a rush of wonder did I hark 
Thine unseen spirit's answer. And the sign 
Of nearness made me dizzy, as with wine 
From the blue bowl of the great Mysteriarch. 
I touched thee not, beheld thee not; the world — 

109 



For all that I might see — 

Rounded her shoulder between thee and me. 

And then my whisper and thine answer, clear 

As Venus questions Mars across the still 

Blue solar chamber, with the same heart-thrill 

As mine, and makes him hear; 

And the two planets counsel in the night — 

Maybe about the birth 

Of a spirit on the intervening earth, 

Whose natal hour makes him their neophyte. 

O wonder-gift of speech ! 

Ethereal medium on whose vibrant wings 

Thy brain's imaginings 

Cross the great circles of the Void, and reach 

My brain, that yearns to thine even as my mouth 

Yearns to thine eager mouth. 

Thy voice to me is that high Emanation 

Out of whose glories came 

The ordered hierarchies of creation — 

Spouse of the unimaginable Name! 

Between thy lips there comes to signal me 

The Word of the great deep, 

Wherein the twain — Memory and Prophecy — 

Their world-long council keep. 

Thy voice. Beloved, is the signature 

After the great clef of the planet Earth — 

The key wherein my being's overture 

Was written by the star that ruled my birth. 



110 



XIV 

Yea, breathe upon me, Love, that I may live 
With an intenser life. 

I would that all my being's ways were rife 
With the sweet certitudes thy life can give. 
Thy breathing has that rhythm the ocean taught 
The artless children of the Lunar reign, 
Before primeval Feeling married Thought 
And brought forth all their progeny of pain. 

How beyond all earth's meaning is the sweet 

Low whisper of that breath which comes to me 

As from the very lips of Eternity — 

Thou visible paraclete 

Out of the timeless vast Invisible ! 

Thy breath is a caress the bodiless Past 

Bestows upon me as a mystic charge. 

Through me to kiss the last 

Breath on the bodiless Future's yearning marge. 

So solemn the mere thought, 

I half forget thy wistful human sweetness, 

Without whose glamour all these things were naught 

But colourless abstractions, void of worth 

Here on the warm, emotion-throbbing earth. 



XV 



Sometimes the dual rhythm of thy breath. 
Love, and thy beating heart, 

111 



Bewilder me with their involved motion. 
In some uncomprehended way thou art 
One with the power of God that measureth 
The heart-throb of the ocean, 
And the wild wind's premeditated breath. 

XVI 

I feel the benediction of thy dear 

Soft hand upon my face. 

From thy caress long rays of ecstasy 

Stream far beyond my being's narrow sphere. 

Losing themselves in the blue deeps of space. 

How does thy lightest touch unseal in me 

Vials of yearning attar, that flow out- — 

Pouring their passionate fragrance over thee! 

Beneath thy hand what strains 

Of ethereal music cry along my veins! 

XVII 

Yea, make me one with thee! 
Clasp me and hold me in that unity 
Stronger than thought, keener than pain — 
The only thing intense enough to seem 
Real in this world of shadow and vague dream. 
Something we must attain 
Calls us, surrounds us, penetrates our lives 
With that unrest no mortal comprehends. 
The answering soul ascends 
Eagerly rung by rung the ladder of flame; 

112 



Heedless of earth, of heaven, it blindly strives 

Toward its supernal aim. 

The angels listen, poised on moveless wings. 

And all invisible things 

Rush through the void, attracted by the light 

That shines around us in the teeming night. 

The sounds of unknown seas are in our ears. 

Time is no more, but lost in one accord 

Are the moments and the years ; 

And seraphs waft us with their orisons 

The fragrance of the roses of the Lord. 

Grasped tight in the great Hand that hurled the suns 

Clear to their goals in space, we two are hurled 

Out in the ether, out in the abyss. 

Till self is lost and whirled 

Round and around like spirits in a storm — 

Out where mad chaos blazes into form. 

And planets, lightning-shod. 

Rush past us with a cry as on they race . . • 

Blinded, we know how Moses hid his face 

Because he was afraid to look on God. 



lis 



THE SPIRIT AND THE BRIDE 



A SONNET SEQUENCE 



THE GUERDON OF DESIRE 

O THOU unknown companion of my soul! 

I reach my yearning empty arms to thee 

Across the baffling dark. Come thou to me 
Now when I call, Beloved, though the whole 
Wide universe of suns and seasons roll 

Between thy world and mine. What sign shall be 

Our spirit seal of ultimate unity, 
Is graven deep on Time's unending scroll. 

The days are heavy-footed; but I know 

Thou wilt not come to me till I can say — 

Though dizzy with pent passion's overflow: 
" O God of Love, if that should be the way 

Thy servant needs must travel, I will go 
Unloved and lonely even to my death day ! " 



THE MYSTIC HILL 

Nay, friend, I am not sad, but very still. 

Waiting the word of Life that shall unbind 
The fetters of my soul. For I shall find 

Some day a pathway up the mystic hill 

AVhere Beauty walks with Love, where dawns fulfil 
The dreams of midnight, and the half divined 
Wonder unveils its face, and every wind 

With perfume of pure faith is all athrill. 



117 



And one will dwell with me in that high place 
Who gazes toward it from the other side, 

Even as I to-day, guarding the vase 

For the immaculate rose, whose petals hide 

The golden heart of mystery and grace, 
The promise of the Spirit and the Bride. 



THE BRIDEGROOM 

I WAIT for you. Beloved, even as they, 

The virgins of the Gospel, through the night 
Waited with lamps all trimmed and burning bright 

The coming of the bridegroom. For the day 

And hour I know not, nor by what strange way 
Your feet may travel. Will you bear a light 
Shining far off, like fame.'' And at the sight 

Will my small lamp respond with lengthening ray? 

Or will you come in silence through the dark, 
Unknown to all but me? The loftiest soul 

Shuns glory sometimes as the heavenly lark 
Loves not the noise of trumpets. I console 

My waiting heart with song — but always mark 
The measure of oil in my lamp's golden bowl. 



118 



THE MYSTIC MESSENGER 

Why do you come to me by night, by day, 
O ether wandering wraith? I would forget 
The vision of your haunting eyes, and yet — 

I dare not bid you either go or stay. 

For fear of Love offending! In the grey 
Austerity of dawn my lids are wet 
With tears that are not grief's, then pale regret 

Murmurs one warning word, and fades away. 

What mystic message has your soul for mine, 
Beyond the reach of language or of thought? 

What jewel from the spirit's guarded mine 

To crown me has your brooding presence brought? 

Beware, fond wraith ! The world is bold, malign. 
And joys to bring such lovely dreams to naught! 



OUT OF THE MAZE 

Out of the world's inextricable maze 

You came and stood beside me ; and I knew — 
After our long first look — that it was you 

For whom the watch-fires of my soul did blaze 

Their beacon through the darkness. Many days 
And many tears our faith must battle through. 
Before the orb of peace will rise in view. 

Blessing the union of our separate ways. 

119 



But in the joy of knowing that you are, 
My soul is strong to dare the long ascent 
To the great light, serene and confident 

That we shall reach Love's temple, though afar: 
That we shall take Love's mystic sacrament. 

And shriven stand before Life's judgment bar. 



RECOGNITION 

When we came face to face that star-set night 

Of miracle, my wondering spirit knew 

The purpose of its unity with you. 
Sealed by some strange, vaguely remembered rite 
In unrecorded ages. A white light 

Hid in your shadow. The caressing dew 

That lies upon the rose the still night through. 
Is less refreshing than that first quick sight 
To my awakened vision. I could see 

God's beauty shining through you, as a veil. 
Your voice was fraught with messages for me 

From the vast virgin Silence; and the frail 
Glass of my life trembled with ecstasy. 

As though it touched the rim of the Holy Grail. 



120 



THE SPELL 

The spell that draws my startled soul to thine 
Seems to be sounded from a secret place 
A million leagues above the world in space. 

Seems to be answered with the countersign 

A million leagues below. What vast design, 
Beyond our need to understand or trace, 
Brought us from dual darkness face to face 

In the great light, fusing thy dreams with mine? 

And oh, what tragic purpose of the stars 
Denied to us the guerdon and the faith. 

Giving the yearning only and the prayer, — 
The word we whisper through the iron bars 
Of absence to Love's melancholy wraith. 
Kissing the avid mouth that is not there! 



ALTER EGO 

In some strange way I do not understand. 
You seem to be another self of mine 
Newly discovered. At the hidden shrine 

Where none save me has ever made demand 

I found you worshipping, and hand to hand 
You met my challenge with the countersign. 
What magic weaver did our ways entwine, 

Inj what long dead and unremembered land ? 

121 



And when I sang to you my secret song^ 
The yearning heart-cry only known to me, 
At the first note you joined the melody, 

Bass to my treble, confident and strong, 
And firmly touched the one elusive key 

In that grand chord that I had sought so long. 



THE HOROSCOPE 



y 



O RADIANT angel of my ruling star! 
Read me the story of the horoscope 
That sent this lover, for I darkly grope 

Before the secrets of thy calendar. 

Thou knowest all things: Tell me, is it far, 
The day that wears my diadem of hope, 
When I shall know Love's plenitude and scope, 

And all his hidden wonders as they are ? 

How blinded are we mortals by our birth ! — 
How poor ! — how powerless in our j oy or sorrow 
The capital of Destiny to borrow. 

Whatever wealth our future may be worth! 

Though I should give the glory of the earth, 
I could not buy one whisper of to-morrow ! 



122 



THE BREAM 

I DREAMED last night you were a little child, 

A man-child that I nourished at my breast; 

Dreamed that your mouth — which never yet pos- 
sessed 
Even my mouth — drank of me in that wild 
And intimate nature-need. Divinely mild. 

They say of motherhood? Ah, no; but blest 

Beyond all peace that exquisite unrest. 
Drawing my life to yours, dream-child, man-child! 

I have been still with wonder all day long. 

The nameless thrill that only women feel 
Yearns in my bosom yet, so passion-strong 

Were your dream-lips, so poignant the appeal. 

And all my world is signed with your sweet seal, 
And all my veins are tremulous with song. 



THE AVOWAL 

I THINK God, when the river of live stars 

Flowed glittering from His fingers, must have known 
A joy like mine when, in your deep man-tone, 

You breathed the words, " I love you ! " Flaming Mars 

Watched in the West, and Saturn's golden bars 
Guarded us from the world. We two alone 
In that full-peopled solitude, had flown 

Beyond the reckoning of man's calendars, 

123 



And stood at time's beginning. You and I ! 
Why, there was nothing else between the sea 
And God's far footstool in the Pleiades! 
" I love you ! " With that strong, ecstatic cry, 
You opened Faith's wide temple doors for me, 
And brought my startled spirit to its knees. 



CONSUMMATION 

Look in mine eyes. Beloved! Is it true 

That you and I have found each other now? 

And when I smooth the dear hair from your brow. 
Do I touch you, and not the shadow of you 
That I have known in dreams the slow years through? 

My soul made long ago its maiden vow 

Before no other than its mate to bow 
In spiritual submission; for it knew — 
Beloved brother of the Inner Shrine! — 

That in the long procession of the years, 

Slow, weighted down with destiny's arrears. 
One laurel-crowned would bring me what was mine. 

Now I will melt the pearl that was my tears, 
And pledge you in Love's sweet and bitter wine. 



124 



LOVE'S FEARLESSNESS 

Love comes to me with nothing in his hand. 

And in his eyes promise of many tears. 

Between our yearning lives the gulf of years 
Yawns emptily — and never to be spanned ! 
Our feet are deep in the uncertain sand 

Of the world's ways^ its noise is in our ears; 

The future^ lying in wait, is big with fears 
And prophecies we cannot understand. 

Yet bravely have we pledged Love, eye to eye. 
Challenging Fate to do her worst with us. 
And though the murky clouds are ominous. 

Broad wing to wing, our spirits dare the sky. 
Seeking in faith to find that marvellous 

Ethereal temple where Love's jewels lie. 



THE WINDS OF FATE 

What mighty wind from Fate's unfathomed seas 
Has blown our flame-winged spirits to this height 
Outside of space and time? The blinding light 

Which dazzles us — whence comes it ? and this breeze 

Sweet with mysterious fragrance, that so frees 
Our souls from little rules of wrong and right. 
From what rose-bowers of interstellar night. 

Love, does it come so fraught with prophecies? 

125 



I guess God's purpose; but I dare not pray. 
Lest He should change it, as my punishment 
For being over-bold. So let us wait 
Here between earth and sky, till He shall say 
Loud in our ears the wonder that He meant 
In leaving us alone with brooding Fate. 



THE MOON PATH 

Last night the moon made over the dark sea 
A path of gold so real, that had I laid 
My hand in thine, and had not been afraid. 

We might have walked together, firm and free. 

Out of this hollow world of phantasy. 

And crossed the threshold of God's house, and made 
Our home among the angels. . . . Now, dismayed. 

Love, I can only stand and gaze at thee. 

The path is gone, the moon is gone, and I — 
I too shall soon be with remembered things 

That tear the heart with yearning. When the 
moon 
Lays next that golden pathway to the sky, 

I shall have hidden my tears in God's wide wings, 
And thou wilt hear alone the sea's sad croon. 



126 



THE FOG 

Grey as the tangled locks of haggard Fate, 
And wet as the midnight pillow of a^ nun 
Whose chaste and pallid bridegroom with the sun 

Vanished at evening, the disconsolate, 

iMad fog envelops us. The sea's long hate 
Is in the siren's screech, and one by one 
The wan waves hiss behind us, and we run 

With blinded eyes toward an unseen gate. 

God answers man by symbols. When he laid 
This veil of mysteries in our ship's wide way. 
He meant that we should read and understand. 
Why, even God, with his great cavalcade 
Of keen, detective angels, cannot say 

Whether our goal be Love's unbounded land! 



THE GIFT OF PAIN 

I PITY happy lovers, who have found 

No rocks across their pathway. They will go 
Down to the dust like little flowers that blow 

In dull domestic gardens, and Life's ground 

Will be no richer for them. We, soul-bound 
By the world's rusty chains, hurled to and fro - 
The playthings of the elements, we know 

What beauty hides in pain's last dark profound. 

127 



And if to-morrow this vast pyramid 

Of grief should crumble, and joy's tender green 
Sprout in our desert, could our hearts unlearn 
Their turned-down page of sorrow? God forbid! 
Should we not oft, remembering, stand and lean 
Together toward these flames that sear and burn? 



THE THEFT 

Between your burning body and your soul, 

How quick the choice that I would leap to make. 
Were choice demanded of me! I would take 

One last look in your eyes, and seek the goal 

Where fleshless spectres gather round Life's bowl, 
Invisible, intangible; would slake 
My thirst of passion only with love's ache. 

Rather than yield your spirit. When Fate stole 

The gem from my^ betrothal ring, she left 
Its pearly radiance with me, and I live 
Now only for the light that it can give — 

I who of all sad souls| am most bereft. 

Be sure God's justice, deep, compensative. 

Will pay our spirits for this body's theft. 



128 



THE QUESTIONER 

I QUESTION the cold stars that answer not; 
I ask of the deep sea that hugged so long 
Our secret to her bosom; even my song 

With queries have I challenged^ for my thought 

Burns with the passion to unsnarl this knot 
Wherein our lives are tangled. Pallid wrong. 
And right, whose beauty lies in being strong, 

These, too, with riddles has my soul besought. 

And still the answer waits. Now will I call 
Loud to your soul. Beloved, with my soul 
Across the leagues of distance. Only you 
Are high enough to gaze above this wall. 

And learned enough to read this hidden scroll 
Whose symbols spell the true and the untrue. 



THE ANSWER 

You are God's answer to me in the dark. 

Blind in the human wilderness I sought 

The road of my redemption, and I wrought 
A chain of devious footsteps. But one spark 
Fell from my star's cold lantern for a mark 

Of divination, and I doubted not. 

And one spring day the desert river brought 
A boat, whose music lured me to embark. 

129 



Down from the prow you came and took my hand. 
Drawing aside the veil that blinded me — 
The veil of old illusions. Now I see 

Clearly the land I leave, and understand 
Even illusion's purpose. Fearlessly 

I sail with you to the undiscovered land. 



LOVE MADNESS 

If this be madness, God, I would not draw 

Ever the curtains of weak sanity 

Between me and Life's face. When I am free 
Under the aegis of Love's ancient law. 
Why should I choose the shackles and the straw 

Of common life, or bend the subject knee 

To dull, plebeian wisdom? Let me be 
Mad with the gods awhile, mad with the awe 
And wonder of this magic, which has made 

Of one man's word the measure of all truth. 
Of one man's eyes the vast starred firmament; 
And in the closure of his hand has laid 

The dew-wet roses of immortal youth. 

And the bread and wine of Love's great sacrament. 



ISO 



THE VOYAGE 

Fearless of life and challenging the Fates^ 
With you I venture in this fragile bark 
To cross the waters of the perilous dark 

Beyond desire's attainment. What word waits 

For us in the great calm that separates 

The known from the unknown? What symbols mark 
The star-scroll of the great Mysteriarch 

As he our destined way premeditates? 

This voyage. Dear, eludes all prophecy, 

And we will whisper neither vow nor prayer 

As we embark. Love's promised land, maybe. 
Beyond the reach of pity or despair, 
Will be the harbour of our souls that dare 

The waves of this unfathomable sea. 



THE MOMENT 

Though to the gods our lives may be supreme 
When rounded unto death, and though some dear 
Remembered joy may jewel some lost year 

Until pure gold its very shadows seem; 

Yet this one moment when we grasp our dream — 
The spirit-fusing moment that is here. 
Is the reflecting surface of a sphere 

Complete and isolate in Time's full stream. 



131 



I need no future, Love, beyond this mark 

Upon the disc of ages, for I hold 
Eternity within my arms, and hark 

To hear Timers clock strike twelve. The word is told 
That I have listened for so long in the dark. 

And all Love's mystic parchment is unrolled. 



LOVE'S HOUR OF SILENCE 

In this the tenderest of all Love's hours, 
When soul to soul unquestioning we lie 
Against the silence, and Life's flood rolls by, 

Red with the petals of his ravished flowers. 

Stirring within my breast I feel strange powers 
Before unknown; and burning in thine eye 
I read new purposes, that amplify 

Into all time these little lives of ours. 

This is the test that lesser lovers fear — 

This unveiled hour when the free heart lies bare 
Before its brother. And our spirits dare 

To breathe together this high atmosphere ! 
Give me again thine eyes, that we may share 

The intimate stillness — nearer and more near. 



132 



PLENITUDE 

So long have I desired thee, and so deep 

My heart's hid spring, whose waters sung thy name 

Over and over till the restless flame 
Of Life stood still to listen, that I weep 
Now when I have thee in my arms, to keep 

Forever. My Beloved, I became 

So perfected in thee, I have no aimi 
Beyond thee, and no harvests more to reap! 

So still is all the world, I feel afraid ! 

Is this that mystic silence, by whose power 
The waiting spirits of the void are made 

In mortal mould? I feel my bridal bower 
Transcendently enlarged, myself — dismayed — 

A dazed intruder on God's working hour. 



THE INSCRIPTION 

Sealed with the seal of Life, thy soul and mine 
Are one this day, and we have graven our date 
Of recognition on Time's ponderous gate. 

Staining the letters deep with love-spilled wine. 

Neither the fire of death nor the strong brine 
Of the world's waters can obliterate 
That record, and the steady hand of Fate 

Under the words has drawn a strange design. 

133 



They are an incantation, justified 

Upon our lips by the incarnate Breath. 

The measure of their potency is wide 

As the world's orbit; for God promiseth 

Unto all love-inscriptions that abide. 

Power and dominion over life and death. 



CONSECRATED 

Since yesterday's communion when I sa"Vf 

Love's consecrating presence in your eyes, 
The world's familiar ways seem otherwise 

Than I have ever known them. Hushed with awe, 

I contemplate some common little law 

Of evolving life; I tremble with surprise 
At new, undreamed-of beauties that arise 

To fill the place of many an ancient flaw. 

And every one I meet along the way 

Turns round to gaze with eager questioning 
Into my face. Beloved, do I bring 
Some wordless message for the world to-day, 
From that love-hallowed garden where we lay 
One golden hour beside God's living spring.'' 



1S4 



DUALITY 

Art thou that Love who came with touch of fire 
But yesterday, in whose impelling eyes 
Smouldered the avid flame that terrifiesi 

The angels by its vision of desire 

Unutterable? To-day the seraph choir 
Holds not a face that worship glorifies 
Like to thy face. Its beauty prophesies 

Fulfilment to all spirits that aspire. 

Thou art the dual mystery of the soul, 

O human Love ! Standing with buried feet 
In the rose-dust of earth, sodden and sweet. 

Thou reachest yearningly to thy far goal 

Beyond the zenith, while thine aureole 

Flames gold and red where dust and spirit meet. 



THE MIRACLE 

Among the hills and valleys of the soul. 
Working his miracles. Love came to me 
And touched my blinded eyes and bade me see. 

I watch the water redden in the bowl, 

I drink the marriage wine. Upon the scroll 
Of Life I trace the Word of prophecy 
In flaming letters; my mortality 

Burns on this altar as a living coal. 



135 



Many of Love's disciples have pursued 

His wandering steps with worldly dreams and wishes; 
Many have climbed, as for a festival, 
The mountain where he feeds the multitude. 

For them the counting of the loaves and fishes, 
For me — the wonder of the miracle! 



IN LOVE'S EYES 

Thine eyes are magic mirrors, where I see 
My own reflected in some marvellous wise 
Beyond man's knowledge; and long thoughts arise. 

Questioning this familiar mystery. 

I feel the dual souls of thee and me 
Mirror each other, even as our eyes, 
Whose mutual, clear reflection verifies 

On earth our vision of Love's unity. 

In our souls, too, I feel the kindred souls 
Of all mankind reflected, by the light 
Of my strong racial faith. Oh, that their sight 

Could quicken to that dream ! For Love unrolls 
Wide vistas for us when our eyes unite — 

Seeking his unimaginable goals. 



136 



THE THRUSH 

O WAKEN^ Love, and listen to the thrush. 
That sings us back into the world again 
After our night in heaven ! How his chain 
Of golden notes is clasped by that brief hush — 
That pearl of thrilling silence, till the rush 
Of his own feeling spills his notes like rain 
Upon the breast of Dawn! This bird has lain, 
Like us, against Night's cheek, and feels it flush 
Now with the sun's warm nearness. — Love of mine, 
We too have found that pearl of silent peace 
Between two chains of joy, each like a trill 
Of this inspired bird. . . . Listen! 'Tis a sign 
From the angels left in Dreamland, to increase 
Our faith that they can find us when they will. 



A VISION 

Seen through the dusky foliage of my hair. 
Your face is shimmering with that mystic light 
Which bathes the spellbound earth on some rare night 

In summer after sunset. Spirits there 

Hide and reveal themselves, shyly aware 
Of their own beauty. Wonder and delight. 
Like starbeams, flit before me, and excite 

My vision till its ecstasy is prayer. 



137 



Are other mortals given in Love's arms 
Ethereal revelations like to mine? 

Surely the gods withhold not the great boon 
Ungenerously, nor blind with wizard charms 
The eyes of those on whose indifference shine 
The passionate stars and rapture-dazzled moon. 



THE MYSTIC ROSE 

I, Woman, am that wonder-breathing rose 
That blossoms in the garden of the King. 
In all the world there is no lovelier thing, 

And the learned stars no secret can disclose 

Deeper than mine — that almost no one knows. 
The perfume of my petals in the spring 
Is inspiration to all bards that sing 

Of love, the spirit's lyric unrepose. 

Under my veil is hid the mystery 

Of unaccomplished aeons, and my breath 
The Master-Lover's life replenisheth. 
The mortal garment that is worn by me 
The loom of Time renews continually; 

And when I die — the universe knows death. 



188 



INDIRECTION 

You marvel at the beauty that I see 
In every line and loving curve of you. 
As if a triumphing archangel blew 

On the dull coals of earth's reality, 

Until they blaze so high with ecstasy 

That God looks down and wonders. But I drew 
Love's veil for other reasons, and I knew 

The human joys through heart's intensity. 

They who pursue Love's pleasures only find 
An empty goblet at the journey's goal; 

But Love's grail-pilgrim, with his different aim. 
Opens the very door they grope behind. 

Because I sought the temple of Love's soul, 
I have become the very altar flame. 



AURORA BOREALIS 

Even as the glory of the northern lights 

On some still winter midnight strikes the soul 
Spellbound with visions, and the boreal pole 

Seems like a flaming ladder that unites 

Heaven and earth; so. Love, thy beauty smites 
My spirit dumb with wonder, and the whole 
Sky of my life burns with the aureole 

Of your bright being blazing on the heights. 



139 



Stranger is Love, more fraught with mystery 
Than yon weird pageant in the northern sky. 

'Twas the lone midnight of my destiny 

When through the void you came to glorify 

With light the cold, dark firmament of me . . . 
Yea, and I know not whence you, came, nor why ! 



THE BODY 

O TALL white lily with thy dark roots held 

And hidden by the ministering mire! 

Thy petals are the luminous attire 
Of the indwelling Spirit, that compelled 
Its flame to mix with earth, and parallelled 

The light with darkness. Blossom of cold fire. 

Beautiful form, yearning with blind desire. 
Now to the dust, now to the stars impelled! 

Oh, why will man debase thee in his thought! 
Thou art so fair, so pure, so undefiled, — 
A wandering* angel from the skies exiled 

For thy seditious sweetness. . . . What power wrought 
Of dust this lily flower — unreconciled 

As yet with man, who understands it not} 



140 



ASLEEP 

Beyond the boundaries of dream he lies. 

Wrapt in the veil of immemorial Sleep. 

The far-off murmur of the rhythmic deep 
Of Being is his breath; it magnifies 
My soul that studies with illumined eyes 

This ageless mystery that mortals keep. 

Spellbound I watch, too quiet now to weep; 
My ears have caught the silence of the wise. 

O Sleep, pale prophet of immortal rest — 
Sleep that relieves the angel of the clod! 

Rocked on the waves of dream that manifest 
The Spirit to the seed within the sod. 

The slumberer sees the shadow of his quest. 
And wakens, wondering at the ways of God. 



THE INDWELLING MYSTERY 

Sometimes when you have held me to your breast, 

A mystic interfusion there has been 

Through all our woven beings. I have seen 
Our separate atoms on some secret quest 
Quiver into each other, and then rest 

In ecstasy of union; while between 

Our minds was only Life's transparent screen — 
The real magician's long-sought alkahest. 



141 



Little we know — we dull_, dust-blinded ones — 
The mysteries of the spirit and the clay! 

Along your kiss — your lightest touch — there runs 
The mute electric word the stars obey; 

And the same power that moves those whirling stins, 
Vibrates in every love word that you say. 



AT THE SUMMIT 

Oh, it were worth the toiling all the way 

Up the steep mountain on whose rocks man dies. 
Only to look in another being's eyes! 

Once, as I gaze in yours day after day! 

Below us in the valley all is grey; 

Above the deep love-river the fog lies, 
And through it groping spirits in disguise 

Peer at each other with a veiled dismay, 

*Twas there we met, bewildered, face to face; 

There we joined hands, beginning the long ascent 
Of that divine acclivity, whose base 

Is mortised in Creation's fundament, 
And whose unmeasured summit marks the place 

Of Love's last unimaginable event. 



142 



THE GUEST 

An hour ago the world was dull and grey, 
And my lone heart, a prisoner in my breast. 
Beat at the iron doors of Fate, oppresst 

By its own heaviness. Now the glad day 

Laughs at the window, and the minutes play 
Lightly with one another; for a guest — 
Great Love himself — has entered in and blest 

My heart's house in his own amazing way. 

His lovely hand laid softly on my hair 
Is like the Muse's touch; and looking up, 
I read within his eyes the long-sought word 
That rounds my life's great lyric. . . . Shall I 
dare.f* . . . 
Yea, in my new-found strength, I lift Love's cup. 
That sacred cup by God administered. 



THE WATCHER 

When I awake from Love's contented sleep. 

And see thee, sleepless, bending over me 

In mystical and brooding ecstasy. 
Then do I know thy love to be more deep 
Than all thy words have said. Then could I weep 

With very awe and wonderment in thee. 

Through the night hours, in hushed solemnity, 
Thy soul and Love a secret vigil keep. 

143 



Fearful is Love lest any step surprise 

The temple of his worship. He would hide 
The altar his white flowers have glorified 

From every gaze but God's. O Love, thine eyes ! 

Their self-abandonment has made me wise 
In hidden knowledge where men's souls abide. 



IN THE DAWN-CHAMBER 

Dear, you have spoiled all other men for me. 
And made them alien to my happiness. 
You have discovered an unknown recess 

In Love's great house of storied masonry. 

There from the window's wide expectancy 

We watch the Dawn's rose-dimpled hands caress 
The shadowed hills — Dawn the high priestess. 

That calls the rolling world continually. 

The other rooms in Love's house are confined 

To views of the valley, and the walls adorning 
Are mottoes of uncertainty and warning — 

The thousand reservations of the mind. 

*Tis only in this chamber that I find 

The outlook on the hills and on the morning. 



144 



WHY 

You ask me why my heart so fondly clings 
Around youj* heart of love. ... Is it because 
High deeds of yours have won the world's applause .^^ 

Is it that your inspired imaginings 

Have stirred to wilder flight my lyric wings? 
Or is it that your yearning passion draws 
Blindly my own, by Love's mysterious laws? 

Nay, Dear, not any of these perfect things. 

Why do I love you, then? Because of this: 
My soul discovered, when our days were new. 
That a high guest in your soul's chamber lies; 
And sometimes, in the rapture of your kiss. 
That angel sleeper — the immortal You — 
A moment wakes and looks me in the eyes. 



THE GENTLE ONE 

No one would ever know from your calm face 

How more than human-sweet you are! There lies. 
Maybe, a dreamy something in your eyes — 

A promise, like the perfume round a place 

Where roses bloom; and though all eyes may trace 
Your mouth's love-moulded lines, none would surmise 
The mother-tenderness that sanctifies 

The man's need in your soul-diffused embrace. 



145 



O hands, whose touch holds all the gentleness 

Of brooding dove-wings in the mellow night! 
O mouth of blood-warm rose leaves, whose caress 
Quivers through me in waves of vibrant light! 
Ye are as potent as the yearning Spring, 
That stirs the earth to lyric blossoming. 



• CARESSES 

The sweet caresses that I give to you 

Are but the perfume of the Rose of Love, 
The colour and the witchery thereof, 

And not the Rose itself. Each is a clue 

Merely, whereby to seek the hidden, true. 
Substantial blossom. Like the Jordan dove, 
A kiss is but a symbol from above — 

An emblem the Reality shines through. 

The Rose of Love is ever unrevealed 
In all its beauty, for the sight of it 

Were perilous to the purpose of the world. 
The hand of Life has cautiously concealed 
The pollen-chambers of the infinite 

Flower, and its petals only half uncurled. 



146 



FULFILMENT , 

I AM SO empty and so incomplete. 

Save when your lips on my lips realise 
For me my own fulfilment. Life denies 

Its own abundance save when two lives meet. 

Within your arms is all I know of sweet, 
And all I need of heaven. When I rise 
From your embrace, I feel a vague surprise 

A sundering from my forehead to my feet. 

You are the key of every kind event. 
You open all the doors of joy to me. 

Your being and my being, interblent 
As the sea and the saltness of the sea. 

Are one inevitable element 

In the great crucible of Destiny. 



THE STORM-LORD 

O SOVEREIGN of the storm ! Thy breath to me — 
Vivid with lightning, vibrant with the sound 
Of that original Word that hurled the round 

Of stars and suns — is intimate and free 

As my own soul. I care not though for thee 
My unripe fruit is fallen on the ground. 
And all my tender little leaves are drowned. 

Life must renew itself in death's dark sea. 



147 



Lover supreme! Imperious lord of storm! 

To be with thee my soul all fear denies. 
And as the ardent earth's desires turn warm 

To meet the lightning triumphing down the skies, 
So to thy passion my responding form 

Thrills with the flame that melts and glorifies. 



THE CUP 

The golden Jemshid, so the Persians say, 
Possessed a magic cup with seven rings 
That — filled with wine — reflected myriad things 

The secrets of the seven worlds that sway 

Between the voids, their morrow, their to-day, 
Their yesterday; and the imaginings 
Of every soul that sorrows, dreams or sings. 

From dim creation's dawn to the last day. 

Thy body, my Beloved, is for me 

That magic cup; my love is the red wine. 
In thee the wonders of the worlds are mine, 

The secrets of the stars and of the sea. 
The avid prayers of every alien shrine. 

All Jemshid's cup revealed, I find in thee. 



148 



THE SANCTUARY 

Our forms. Beloved, lie in faith's white bed. 
Lavender-fragrant linen covers them, 
And underneath is a robe whose broidered hem 

Was sewn by the great Spinner's measured thread. 

A red rose guards their feet, and at their head 
A tall white lily leans upon a stem 
Whose roots are in that deathless anadem 

Which bound Love's brows when he and Life were wed. 

The wavering flame of one lone candle gives 
Their image to the shadows; and they seem 

As in a midnight chapel, fugitives 
Before the altar light's ideal stream. 

Love, through this veil of Beauty all that lives 
In every world is softened to a dream. 



LOVE'S AVATARS 

Love, in what alcove of eternity 

Have thou and I this marvel found before - 

This glamour of desire that quivers o'er 
Our bodies and our souls with certainty 
Of the supreme attainment? Where were we 

Wound in this vine the ages now restore? 

Where did I drain the cup that evermore 
Will fill my veins with ecstasy in thee? 



149 



The shadows of thy leaf-brown hair have been 
The veil of many bygone dreams of mine; 

And thy deep eyes, that mine are mirrored in, 
Are filled with memories and wondershine. 

Ay, every door of love to which we win. 
We open by some ancient countersign. 



CREATION 

Hidden in thee abounding wonders lie. 

And wait to be made visible by me; 

For through the medium of our unity 
We touch that reservoir of world-supply 
Where rest the forms, for Love to magnify. 

Of all the houseless souls that are to be. 

Tenuous, waiting in eternity 
To live, to love, to suffer and to die. 

The arch-creative mission is Love's own — 
Moulder of substance! kindler of the mind! 
Call of the spirit! And while one alone 
May compass knowledge, in the Self enshrined, 

Only the lover in his joy has known 
Origination after his own kind. 



150 



LOVE'S INFINITY 

Though I have given all my love to thee. 
Abundance measureless remains behind. 
Freely I give, for thou wilt never find 

A barrier to my soul's infinity 

Of tenderness or passion. Canst thou see 

The outposts of the void, the bournes that bind 
The star-mote's journey and the will of the wind.^ 

They are no farther than the marge of me! 

Boundless I am as the star-dancing deep 

Reflected in this bubble that is I. 
Gaze till thine eyes are weary, and then sleep 

Within the bosom of the mirrored sky. 
Love has no limit that I need to keep. 

Love has no terror that I need to fly. 



THE SEAL 

The lips of my pure Love have set their seal 
Upon the hidden chamber of my soul. 
And all my being's house yields him control 

Even my haughty self. Yet his appeal 

Is to be servitor! I saw him kneel 

Here at my feet, as at some sacred goal; 
As a knight of old before that mystic bowl 

Whose ultimate beauty earth may not reveal. 



151 



I lay my soul fearlessly in his hands. 

O gift that in the giving glorifies 
Me more than the gold crowns of many lands ! 

Be thou to him the rose of paradise. . . . 
Only the rapt ecstatic understands 

The lore of Love_, or looks Love in the eyes. 



REALISATION 

Through all the pageant of the restless years, 
Peopled by many shadows, I have known 
One vision the world's phantoms leave alone. 

One dream whose beauty dries the midnight tears 

Of loveless desolation. It appears 

Ever the same — a; soul blent with my own 
As two harmonious lute-strings in one tone. 

As the earth's man-divided hemispheres. 

Beloved, when you came to me I knew 

You mine, yet — so uncertain does life seem — 

I did not realise that I held in you 

The hemisphere, the lute-string and the dream 

To perfect me, until we slowly grew 

One world, one tone, one vision of the Supreme. 



152 



THE PRICE OF LOVE 

Heavy the price that I have paid for thee, 
Strange Love, in whose unfathomable eyes 
The radiant God has veiled in thin disguise 

The full reflection of His majesty, 

That else were unendurable to me 

By sheer excess of light. But I am wise 
For every bauble that I sacrifice 

On the high altar of thy mystery. 

Nothing is had for nothing, and I know 
How trivial is the price that I have paid. 
It is a fabulous bargain I have made 
With the blind traders of the world; and so 
I set Love's jewel on my brow, and go 
Into the blessed stillness, unafraid. 



LOVE'S MYSTIC JEWEL 

What is the merit of our souls that we 

Should find this treasure all mankind have sought, 
And died in seeking? Other souls have brought 

As pure a purpose — failing utterly. 

Was it our faith which won for thee and me 

The substance that we hoped for? Sages taught 
Aeons ago that everything was naught 

Beside this jewel of strange potency. 

153 



Hope trembles at his shadow on the ground; 
The weary world labours for glittering spoils 
That turn to ashes, and all lovers sigh. 
But thou and I, Beloved, we have found 
In Time's wild ocean after many toils, 

That perfect pearl for which the world would die. 



CONFESSION 

Yea, Dear, lay bare thy lovely soul, nor fear 
That any wraith of shame can enter in 
This guarded house of faith, nor any sin 

Darken for me Love's mirror, crystal-clear 

For all thy revelations. Thou art peer 

Now of Love's lofty ones, whose heights begin 
Always in humbleness, and thou shalt win 

A pearl of rapture for thine every tear. 

My love is reverent as the virgin prayer 
Whose power the gate of paradise unbars; 
My love is tender as the ecstasy 
Of the young mother as she grows aware; 
And full of understanding as the stars 
That shone in wonder over Galilee. 



154 



THE PAST 

Had I the power to wipe away the past, 

That past replete with love and joy and pain 
In which thou hadst no portion; could again 

My Book of Life be opened, and my vast 

Experience be shattered by a blast 

Of God's great trumpet, — I would still ordain 
Those ways that are accomplished, and remain 

Myself, for good or evil, to the last. 

For every throb of love has been to me 
A promise of thy coming; every thrill 
Of joy a prophecy thou shalt fulfil. 

And every pang of pain an ecstasy 

Of growing knowledge. But, O Love, there still 

Are infinite deeps to be revealed by thee ! 



THE COVENANTERS 

I WONDER, Love, how you and I did live 
Before we found, each in the other's eyes. 
This covenant of faith that justifies 

Our souls' desires ! Homeless and fugitive 

Before those earthly ministers who give 
Only to common minds the master's prize. 
We have eluded their world-honoured lies. 

That have no place in our true narrative. 



155 



How did I live ere you revealed for me 
The testament of truth, the tenuous veil 

Of unseen beauty, and the verity 

Of light's clear word? Tender and human-frail 

You are with love, but in your eyes I see 
Strange visions of a new and holier grail. 



LOVE-SLEEP 

Yea, let me sleep among the murmuring leaves 
Of the great Tree of Love. Why should 1 wake? 
Even in dreams our wedded spirits make 

One light against the darkness. Languor weaves 

A veil to cover us, and Night receives 

Our beings as a charge for Nature's sake. 
Give me thy lips, Beloved, and then shake 

Upon my lids the dews of all Love's eves. 

The Tree of Love is waving to and fro 
Upon the winds of midnight, and the sigh 
Of dreaming leaves is like a lullaby 

Over the brooding earth. Far, far below 
A planet whispers, and our low reply 

Is lost in the dream-river's overflow. 



156 



THE MENACE 

When I remember, Love, that but for thee 
My homeless spirit still would wander lone, 
Alien in this inhospitable zone 

Upon the globe of Time ; when rapturously 

I touch the gleaming j ewel of unity — 

Whose dual rays are thy soul and my own — 
Then do I tremble lest the masked unknown 

Brigand of Death snatch thee away from me. 

All other perils we can brave together. 

Challenging them to part us. But beyond 

The shifting boundaries of the realm of breath 
Are many dangers and uncertain weather. 
Nothing can rend our Nature-woven bond 
Save the inexorable caprice of Death. 



THE HAND 

In some great school of magic long ago, 

I do believe a mighty master taught 

Your hand its potent spell, and you have brought 
The wonder back to earth. A touch — and lo ! 
Through all my being dreams and visions flow. 

Upon what immemorial loom was wrought 

The fabric of this feeling, strong as thought. 
And tenuous as the weft of the rainbow? 

157 



Your touch is like the benedicite 

Of all divine and never-ending things. 

Yea, and I feel in every vein of me 

The lyric sweetness of a thousand springs. 
The stirrings of innumerable wings, 

And the wild surge and melody of the sea. 



SISTERS 

Within your eyes the women you have known 
Beckon to me with long white wavering hands 
Across the gulfs of time. My spirit stands 

Before the mirror of you — not alone, 

But blent with strange reflections. There are blown 
Here shadows on the winds of many lands, 
Fair shapes whose garments brush the shifting sands 

Of desert love, where all dead seeds are sown. 



Others there are less tenuous, whose lips 
Have not forgotten the old ways of speech. 
"Sister," they call me, and the tones beseech; 

They beat upon my heart like little whips. 
Trembling with timid wistfulness, I reach 

Into the void for these weird fellowships. 



158 



I LOVE YOU 

Why do I say, " I love you " ? I have said 

Those words to lesser lovers long ago, 

Deluded lovers in the plains below 
This pure inviolate height where we were led 
For purposes prophetic. I have read 

Those words on youth's blank pages, seen them glow 

Like lanterns in life's darkness; yet I know 
Now they were only forms untenanted. 

Love, I compare the ardours of the past 
With our high passion, as a bard compares 

The music of his first songs with his last; 

The little songs, that were but stammered prayers, 

With those momentous chants whose power the vast 
Organ of Art in thunderous tone declares. 



THE CANDLE 

Your face, Beloved, is a pure white flame 
Upon the world's high altar. In your eyes 
The ascending spirit of the sacrifice 

Yearns, in its self-consuming, toward the Name 

Blazoned upon the temple. You reclaim 

The hopes of long-lost worshippers; they rise 
Emboldened for the sacred enterprise 

Whose guerdon is beyond the end of fame. 



159 



You are the blessed candle set above 

The Book and the sacrament — the light of truth, 
Which calls the flaming spirits to aspire. 
Shedding its radiance on the blood of love. 
O yearning soul of consecrated youth, 

My faith would light its taper at your fire! 



EXORCISM y 

Lonely I am to-day and full of doubt, 
Questioning Fate, and dallying vt^ith Fear, 
That vaguely whispers warning in my ear 

Of unknown perils, past my finding out; 

Until I wonder what 'tis all about — 
My pilgrimage on this erratic sphere, 
The solitary quest from year to year. 

My soul within and all the world without. 

And then I hear your footstep on the stair. 
And feel the clinging question of your kiss. 

O wizard Love! My spectres in despair, 
Seeing your face, have fled to the abyss. 

How strange it seems that I should ever care 
For any cause or purpose beyond this! 



160 



TEARS 

*Tis not because of any lack in thee, 

Beloved, that I weep, nor any pain 

The wisest lover ever could explain 
In terms of human sorrow. But I see 
In Love's immortal garden a dark tree 

Whose name I know not, and the winds complain 

Forever through its leaves in lone refrain; 
Even the birds avoid it silently. 

But I believe if ever I should dare 

To lie beneath that tree a whole night long, 
That in the morning I should know the song 

God sang when Eve was tempted, and the prayer 
That made the Galilean pity-strong 

In the night-watches when no man was there. 



THE IDEAL 

I AM as those of whom the Hindoos say, 

" A god has kissed them "; for Love came to me 

Ideal Love, that passionate verity 
That touches mortals in some swiftening way 
And startles them to faith. Aye, day by day 

The wonder lives with me, and fearlessly 

I gaze into its eyes — O ecstasy 
For which the waiting ages thirst and pray ! 



161 



Guerdon of all the soul's accomplishment! 

Thou art a sign for me in the dark place. 
Thou art the wide inviolable tent 

That hides me from the storm. Thy close embrace 
Is what the rapturous earth has always meant 

By the vague_, haunting beauty of her face. 



THE DUAL VISION 

Sometimes when you are one with me as brain 
Is one with thought while prisoned in this dust; 
When, blended utterly, our souls adjust 

Their dual vision — as the eyes though twain 

Are one in seeing; I can scarce restrain 
My tears of pity for the souls that must 
Go seeking Love in mazes of distrust, 

With dreams too unsubstantial to attain. 

We who have seized the great Reality, 

We who have ravished the aifrighted bride 

Of human Love — frail Faith — and made her see 
The bridegroom's naked beauty, have thrown wide 

A door into the Future, where the free 
Spirits of Time invisibly abide. 



162 



GENESIS 

Love, you and I were the original Cell, 
Locked in the silence of eternity, 
And in the winding arms that were to be 

When we should be dissevered. Then the bell 

Of Time sounded within us, the rapt spell 
Of aeons lifted, and the ecstasy 
Of sempiternal being, wild and free. 

Whirling and swirling, broke our tenuous shell. 

And we were flung even to the outer rim 
Of the expectant Dark, whose calendars 

Called for our coming; and we blazed on him — 
The latest of a thousand Avatars. 
Your scattered seed became the suns and stars. 

And I became the space wherein they swim. 



THE TRIANGLE 

Come thou, my Lover of the storied past. 
And thou, my Lover of the strong to-day. 
In each beloved hand, oh, let me lay 

The other's hand in brotherhood at last! 

In that high region where I hold you fast — 
Though leagues divide us — is a luminous way, 
Where walk those all-wise beings who survey 

Calmly the deeps where all Love's lies are cast. 



163 



Oh, love ye one another ! For we near — 
A little every day — that master-height 
Where none may venture save with unveiled sight; 

But where our souls must face the thing we fear, 

In one another's eyes without a tear 

Beholding Truth, and daring the great light. 



LOVE-WRAITH 

Sometimes, when I am musing all alone. 
Into my being flows the sense of thee 
In overwhelming fulness, and I see 

Thy secret soul's unguarded portals thrown 

Open for my soul's entrance to its own. 
In such a moment thou art nearer me 
Than in my presence — unreservedly 

I lift the veil that covers the unknown. 

And so I wonder if our parted hours 

Have not a purpose neither one perceives; 
If kisses and love words are not the leaves 
Of Love's tree, and these visions the rare flowers 
Fragrant and pure as the spiritual powers 
Our dual-self in solitude achieves. 



164. 



THE SILENCE OF LOVE 

Sweet are the words of Love, but sweeter far 
Is Love's initiate silence. When we lie 
Between Life's lips. Beloved, thou and I, 

Our rapture-blended beings are a bar 

Even to lyric speech. A word might mar 
The visions in our spiritual sky. 
Where every little bird that flutters by 

Is some world-message flying to a star. 

In Love's great silence are the timid things 
That fear the trumpet of the lord of sound. 

They brush against our souls with noiseless wings. 
They tremble toward us from the teeming ground. 

Some day, in the high stillness that Love brings, 
Life's unimagined secret shall be found. 



SUMMER-ABSENCE 

I WONDER if the trees that beckon thee 
To their deep shadows in thy lone retreat 
Are tender as my arms; and if the sweet. 

Soft, yielding grass clings to thee lovingly 

As I in drowsy hours. The ecstasy 
That quivers in the ever-moving wheat 
Whispers of love to thee^ and the strong beat 

Of Nature's heart woos thee continually. 



165 



Love^ we are one, the moving wheat and I, 

And the great heart of Nature. When the trees 
Beckon to thee, I beckon; when the blades 
Of grass caress thy fingers as they lie 

Entangled with them, I am even in these; 
And I am hiding in the twilight shades. 



THE CLOCK 

Before the hour when thou wilt come to me, 
Oh, with what laggard and deliberate pace 
The minute-hand moves up the clock's white face! 

Even desire is powerless to foresee 

Its goal, meridian-pointing. Destiny 

May but have wound her clock within an ace 
Of the last notch, and by that little space 

Silence may enter here — instead of thee. 

The tick-tick is thy footsteps on the way, 

Heard by my listening heart; and the hour-chime 
Will be our old Earth-Mother's evening song, 
Seeing her children happy. . . . Do not stay 
Thy numbered steps, O Love-retarding Time! 
Joy is so brief, and eternity so long! 



166 



THE SEA OF LOVE 

Your love is like the ever-moving sea, 

That changes not and yet is always new. 

I bathe my spirit on the shores of you. 
And in your deeps divine that mystery 
Hid from the world's beginning. Wild and free, 

The tempests of your heart are those that blew 

Secrets to old Atlantis, and I view 
On your horizon lights of destiny. 

I would attune my being to the rhyme 

Of your recurrent tides. I would embrace 

With your soul's waves the shores of every clime. 
And with your surface calm reflect the face 

Of that illimitable Lord of Time — 

The vast star-shining horologue of space. 



NATURE-LONGING 

To be alone with Nature, you and I 
Together in some undiscovered place. 
Where we may look kind Silence in the face. 
And learn of the wise winds that wander by. 
The secret of their healing! Oh, to lie 

For hours on Time's broad bosom, with blue space 
Laid on us like a garment ! To embrace 
The motherly trees, that never will deny 
Comfort to their strayed children! Let us find 

167 



The road that beckons where the days are green. 
The nights a hue our eyes have never seen, 
And leaving the world-dissonance behind, 
Seek the earth-harmony. Then our dust-blind 
Spirits shall learn what their own longings mean. 



LOVE'S LYCEUM 

Sometimes for recreation Love and I 

Challenge each other to a game of thought — 
A battle of words and meanings, subtly fought 

For mutual revelation. And we vie 

For vantage points, striving to fortify 

Those visioned heights our separate roads have sought. 
From Logic's flint our steels have struck and caught 

Red, splendid sparks, too luminous to die. 

But ere our minds' lamps burn a steady flame. 
The flickering light cast on each lover's face 
Shows to the other some ecstatic grace. 
Too madly sweet for reason. Then the game 
Ceases, forgotten, with its brilliant aim — 
For we are melted in the flame's embrace. 



168 



EPHEMERA 

What are the toils and troubles of my days. 
But restless gnats that buzz around the ears 
Of my soul's musing Sphinx? She only hears 

Time's immemorial music, nor obeys 

The calls that echo from the tinsel maze 
Of transitory care. Pallid with fears, 
The mad world plunges down the weary years. 

Through arid and unsatisfying ways. 

Oh! what to me are these ephemeral things? 
They are forgotten when at night I rest, 
Love, in that warm eternity — your breast. 
Close, close to us the loving Silence clings. 
Brooding with wide, immeasurable wings. 
Our dream that is the treasure in her nest. 



THE OAK 

You bend above me as a loving tree 
Bends to the tender ivy that is wound 
About its mighty body; you surround 

My being as the tree's immensity 

Surrounds the ivy. Gazing up, I see. 

On your aspiring head, dominion crowned 
With arch-druidic sign, and in the ground 

Your potent roots guard mine perpetually. 



169 



Softly, O softly, do my tendrils cling 
About you in the breezes ! I delight 
Even to sway aside and measure your height. 

But when the storm, with awful muttering, 

Threatens the stillness — then I grasp you tight. 

Like any other frail and frightened thing. 



UNDER THE SKY 

Here with Love's languorous and abundant ease 
Familiar, this entrancing night we lie 
In rapt abandon to the naked sky — 

Nothing between us and the Pleiades ! 

Alcyone's great secret might appease 

The yearning of our souls, might verify 
Their dreams of unity. Do not deny 

Its message to our ears, O minstrel breeze! 

Love, yield thy spirit to the influence 
Of those unbounded spaces overhead. 
It was for this we made our bridal bed 
In Freedom's roofless mansion. Rising hence, 
Our passion sighs, like burning frankincense, 
Perfume all stars by lovers tenanted. 



17Q 



THE VIRGIN SHRINE 

You pray me, Dear, to find some virgin shrine. 
Some sacred place that none has ever known 
In my heart's house, where you and I alone 

'May worship one another. Bread and wine 

Wait on an altar where no soul save mine 
Has bowed before the Host, with lilies grown 
In God's abundant garden. I have sown 

Before the door the seeds of the secret vine. 

There time is not. To-day and yesterday 
Blend with to-morrow and eternity. 

Even as our souls will blend if there we pray. 
Dare you to enter now and stand with me 

In the white stillness? I will show the way. 
And in your hand place the prophetic key. 



THE CHILD 

The tyrant world denies me, little one. 
The joy of building you a mortal frame; 
Yet my great Love and I have called the flame 

Of your free spirit from the ardent sun 

Of God's creative dream. You were begun 
At our souls' mystic marriage; and you came 
Into our lives, urging your tender claim, 

Haxmting and tenuous as deeds undone. 



171 



And though we never feel your hands in ours. 
Nor hear the wonderful sound of your small feet 

Over the earth, you breathe for us in flowers; 
In our own hearts your tiny pulses beat; 

And through the long inviolable hours 

Of dream we hold communion high and sweet. 



WORDS 

Why do our words divide us like a wall, 
And only in the stillness, through the eyes 
Or the rapt lips, our spirits in surprise 

Rush flaming on each other? When you call 

My wraith to you afar, it brings you all 

My dumb lips dare not carry. We disguise 

The soul with veils of speech — poor soul, that tries 

To pour the ocean through a pipe, so small! 

Oh, for the courage to endure the flame 

Of God's tremendous silence, heart to heart. 

On the sheer height where weak words are forgot; 
Where faith is all the foothold, and the aim 
Only to find the soul its counterpart, 

In the white sphere where space and time are not! 



172 



THE VEIL 

Beloved^ let my dark hair cover thee, 

Veiling thy face from my long gazing eyes; 
For I am weary as the daylight dies 

Into the shadow — the uncertainty 

That yearns to hide the world. Be now to me 
The undiscovered guerdon, the far prize 
That waits the soul's endeavour — till I rise 

Eager again to solve the mystery. 

As I have hidden thee in my long hair, 

So would my passion cover thee with dream 

And soul-alluring glamour. Dost thou dare 
Always to face my spirit in supreme 

And blinding revelation? Oh, beware! 

Love's veils are more essential than they seem. 



TRUTH 

When Pilate questioned Him of Galilee 

With, "What is truth? " the Master, we are told. 
Said not a word. That story in fine gold 

Was graven on Time's rocks for you and me. 

Have we not proven truth and falsity 
Two faces of one coin, and candour sold 
To buy this purer pearl? Deep fold on fold 

Grows the immortal rose of verity. 



173 



And yet I tremble sometimes in the night 
When all the world is still, and in your arms 
I listen for the wonder of your breath. 
Though round your head shines truth's unwavering light, 
My soul this hour is filled with vague alarms. 

Lest we have dared that falsehood which is death. 



THE CRUEL WORD 

When I have said some cruel word to you. 
All the night long I feel it burn and smart 
Deep in the hidden softness of my heart; 

And if perchance I know the word was true. 

Then do my vindicating tears pursue 
Reason, till it absolves you. As in art. 
So even in love is light the counterpart 

Always of shadow. Can we blend the two? 

That were a twilight grey and passionless, 
Wherein the flowers of life would open pale. 
And Love grow weary of his own delight. 
Better the fiery noon, the fierce caress, 

The radiant rose — and then, as countervail. 
Tears and the lonely darkness of the night. 



174. 



JOY OF LOVE 

Beloved, when I hear the low complaining 

Of little lovers in whose jealous eyes 

The weak tears wait, whose souls would agonise 
Between the breasts of Aphrodite, chaining 
Her freedom with their servitude, and staining 

The splendour of her gift with their mean sighs; 

When these I hear, and pity, and despise. 
How great you loom — the j oy of Love maintaining ! 

Yours is that master sight that sees the sun 
Blaze in the nadir on the darkest night. 

For you the roses bloom, the rivers run 
In icy winter, and the ultimate right 

Waits in all wrong. O god-instructed one. 
Wise with the wisdom of the world's delight! 



ISOLATION 

Sometimes when I am very close to you 
In form and feeling, suddenly a thought 
Of our eternal separateness makes naught 

Of all our vows, and I am smitten through 

With sense of isolation. Is it true. 

Beloved, that the visions we have caught 
Of perfect union may be phantoms wrought 

Of our own brains, and dyed in their own hue.'' 

175 



Wlien in my very arms you lie asleep, 

Your dreams may be a thousand miles away. 

I hear your words, but unknown meanings keep 
Vigil behind your lips,( and when we say, 

** Forever, Love ! " our listening angels weep. 
Gazing at one another in dismay. 



ABSORPTION 

Beloved, in the still deeps of thine eyes 
Absorb my soul, that I may feel no more 
This pain of separation! I implore 

Thy Self to take me in, and solemnise 

My union with thee in some mystic wise. 
I would no more be I; but would explore. 
As thee, thy souFs dim temple, and adore 

Therein, as thee, with secret sacrifice. 

Oh, let me die to Self and find rebirth 
In some fair body as one breath with thee ! 
There are no purposes in life for me 
But as thy complement; nor any worth 
In all the fame and splendour of the earth - 
Unless one perfect spirit we may be. 



176 



OPULENCE 

You are the flowing of Love's opulence 
Over the meagre measure of my days, 
Whose scattered drops along the world's dry ways 

Shall be as wells of beauty. In their tents, 

The watchful nomads on life's lone immense 

Grey desert call them songs. Who thirsts betrays 
His secret need of love, and tribute pays 

To you, Beloved, when his soul assents. 

For each drop of this water is a song 
That but for you had never taken form 
Out of the vapour of silence. Prophecy 
Sometimes is mirrored there, and symbols long 
Invisible; while mystic visions swarm 
Across these fragile spheres of poetry. 



AS A THOUSAND YEARS 

'Tis said that in the Lord's abiding place 

A single day is as a thousand years. 

So was that day we spent among the spheres 
That roam Love's interspiritual space. 
In vision we beheld the eternal Face; 

While Time, whose sands are crystallised love-tears. 

Sustained them, till the hours were in arrears. 
To guard from envious worlds our soul's embrace. 



177 



And now that our ecstatic interlude 

In Life's discordant song is passed away; 

Now Time's depleted hour-glass is renewed_, 
To measure our reunion's long delay, 

These thousand years of pain and solitude 
Shall also to that Lord be as one day! 



PARTED ' 

Love, I have wept thine absence till my eyes 

Are heavy with the burden of their tears. 

Insistently against my inner ears 
The hot, desirous blood knocks, and defies 
This cloistral quietude that crucifies 

The heart of Love. — O Lord of days and years ! 

Send back my lover, though it moves the spheres 
And hurls the seasons forward in the skies ! 

Time is my enemy. The laggard days 

Mock me with pallid laughter, as they ride 
Slowly around the earth. In shame they hide 
Their eyes from me, veiling the tell-tale rays 
They stole from Love's eyes, for their light betrays 
They passed him on the round world's other side. 



178 



AUTUMN '-^ 

Chill is the night and cheerless. All alone 
I linger here under the cedar tree, 
Whose deep autumnal murmur dolourously 

Blends with the sea's monotonous undertone. 

Beloved, all the summer birds are flown 

And all the flowers. The shifting mockery 
Of dead leaves covers everything, and thee — 

Thee too the autumn covers with her own. 

Wilt thou return, Beloved, with the spring. 

When leaves and birds and flowers come back again? 

Wilt thou return when mating robins sing 
In cedar shades their happy love-refrain? 

Or shall I watch each tender natural thing 
Return to joy — and watch for thee in vain.'' 



FAITB. 

O FRIENDLY Faith! Thy cool hands are as white 
As moonbeams on the waves they lull to sleep. 
Press down my eyelids, that I may not weep, 

And hold me close through all this cruel night. 

Stay thou with me until, over the height. 
The sun of Love arises from the deep — 
The unknown ocean of absence. I would keep 

Vigil with thee, O Faith ! till the daylight. 



179 



My Love is sealed with truth, and he is mine — 
Mine as my breath, blended and one with me 
As my own memories, as inseparably 

Fused with my substance as the colour of wine 
Is blended with its perfume. Tenderly, 

O angel Faith! guard Love's unlighted shrine. 



THE LETTER ^' 

Silence and separation and the ache — 

The restless passionate desire to see 

One being alone of all humanity! 
Why do we banish angels for the sake 
Of housing these dull mortals, who would make 

Our souls their playtoys! Love, come back to me! 

This world is a dream of unreality, 
And only in your presence am I awake. 

And then they bring your letter. . . . And my world 
Suddenly thrills, and is no more a dream, 
But quiveringly real. Christ never wrought 
Miracle greater than this missive, whirled 

Through space from the Hesperides — a gleam 
Of the ineffable Light, all wonder-fraught. 



180 



LOVE'S WASTED DAYS 

I WEARY of the burden of these days^ 

These heavy days when we are far apart. 
No empty winning in the worldly mart 

Can ever profit us; no idle praise 

Can compensate us for our love's delays. 

There come from Life's dark forest where thou art. 
Only the echoes of my crying heart — 

Thy lone cries borne along the barren ways. 

Outside the brooding fold of thine embrace, 

The sunbeams burn me and the shades affright. 

I am a wind-blown meteor in space, 

Robbed of the guidance of thy love's great light. 

My life, without the beacon of thy face, 
Is wasted on the ways of outer night. 



SEPARATE 

I AM so lonely and so far from thee! 
I clasp and importune the listening air, 
Whose tresses touch thy distance; but my prayer 

Brings only its own echo back to me. 

My soul is sick with the world's tyranny! 

What are the wills of men, that they should dare 
Intrude themselves between our breasts, and tear 

Our spirits from their shrines irreverently? 



181 



Defy them^ and return to me this day! 

For in a little while we shall be dead; 
And all the treasures we can take away 

Are memories of the love-words we have said^ 
Shadows of hours together, and the grey 

Caressing ghosts of lips that once were red. 



ABSENCE 

Thou art not here, Beloved, and the night 

Is void and meaningless for want of thee. 

There is no fragrance in the flowers for me, 
Nor any glamour in the wan moonlight. 
I hear no woodland warbler's lyric flight — 

Only the cricket, crying mournfully, 

And low sobs of the melancholy sea — 
Lonely as I, for all her awful might. 

O thou who hast all beauty where thou art! 
Return and bring it with thee, I implore. 
Bring back the world's lost meaning. From before 

Thy face all desolation will depart. 

Whenever I hear thy footsteps at the door, 

The bird of wonder warbles in my heart. 



182 



WAITING 

O AGONY of waiting ! I believe 

Life has no burden of penitence or loss 
So hard to carry as thy restless cross; 

Nor any torment mortal may conceive 

So powerless to attain its own reprieve. 

The treasures of the scheming world seem dross 
And emptiness ! I would not go across 

My garden all earth's wonders to achieve! 

Because, if I should venture from the door, 
Should wander down some path a little way, 
He would be sure to come this very day. 

Though I had waited for him weeks before. 
For Fate is watching, eager to betray. 

And I should mourn this hour forevermore. 



AFTER LONG ABSENCE 

This is the day — the hour — if all be well. 
When my Beloved will return to me 
Out of the world's malign immensity. 

Where lurks Disaster, the cold infidel 

That envies lovers. Could I but dispel 
My fears of some immutable decree 
Of the dark Fates, forbidding joy to be. 

That will not let Love pass their sentinel! 



183 



When he shall come, his presence will restore 
Refreshment to the water, the lost light 
To the wan moon, and to the restless night 

Repose and plenitude forevermore. 

Even the homing birds will pause in flight 

When I shall hear his footsteps at my door. 



THE ABYSM 

Dazed with a rapture long deferred, I feel 
Afraid to face the sheer immensity — 
The wild abysm of my desire for thee. 

My woman-heart trembles, and would conceal 

The measure of its wealth; but I reveal 

Through voice and hands and eyes the ecstasy 
That beats at the defenseless doors of me, 

Moved by thy love's unutterable appeal. 

O bid me go into the wilderness. 

Or to the desert regions of the earth. 

To be with thee ! There would be plenitude 
Of beauty for me there, if thy caress 
Waited in every shadow, and no dearth 
Beside thee in the arid solitude. 



184 



INSATIATE 

My tremulous, intense desire of thee 

Transcends this earthly garment that is thine. 

When thy love-graven dust is fused with mine 
As fragrance with a flower, there still for me 
Are luring, unknown deeps of mystery 

To be descended never; and I pine 

In mystic passion, for thy soul's dim shrine 
Is domed by vistas of Infinity. 

Oh, to behold thy spiritual face — 

Thy very Self, unveiled of earth's disguise! 

When I have wrested from involved space 
The only unity that satisfies, 

And hold thy naked soul in my embrace, 
I shall know God, and gaze into His eyes. 



BEYONDNESS 

Beloved, Time and veiled Eternity 

Reach to caress me with your vibrant hands. 
The gods of old salute me, and the sands 

Of long absorbed seas return to be 

The witness of our footsteps. When I see 
Within your eyes the lure of unknown lands 
And unknown lives, an ecstasy expands 

My being beyond Time's frail boundary. 



185 



The measure of the beneath and the above 
Is in your hand; your feet are on the ages. 

Over your head^ visible to the sages. 

Hovers the luminous immortal dove; 

And on your memory's unapparent pages 

Are written all the hidden ways of Love. 



MICROPROSOPOS 

Behind the orient darkness of thine eyes, 

The eyes of God interrogate my soul 

With whelming love. The luminous waves that roll 
Over thy body are His dream. It lies 
On thee as the moon-glamour on the skies; 

And all around — the yearning aureole 

Of His effulgent being — broods the whole 
Rapt universe, that our love magnifies. 

O thou, through whom for me Infinity 
Is manifest! Bitter and salt, thy tears 
Are the heart-water of the passionate spheres, 

With all their pain. I drink them thirstily! 

While in thy smile is realised for me 
The flaming joys of archangelic years. 



186 



THE TOWER 

Your love is like a mighty tower for me. 
When I am weary and the world is dark. 
From your high battlements my thoughts embark 

Upon the tenuous wings of poetry, 

Voyaging to the stars. Sovereign and free. 
The inter-stellar dreams' great hierarch 
Marshals his legions round us, as a mark 

In the encircling vast uncertainty. 

Steadfast we stand together, you and I^ 
Untroubled by false visions, unafraid. 
Though often menaced by the jagged blade 

Of neighbour-lightning. As the clouds go by, 
We watch the wraiths of old religions fade 

Into that faith which love shall verify. 



'ACME 

Throned in the purple shadows of thy hair. 
Mystery is exalted. In thine eyes 
Burns the supreme desire that never dies. 

The demiurgic fire whose power I dare 

To meet and mix me with. I do not care 
Whether the end be gain or sacrifice, — 
Only to touch! the poetry that lies 

Behind the beauty that allures me there! 



187 



As wine in water, let me lose in thee 

The boundaries of myself. Give me to drink 
The cup between thy lips — I will not shrink 

Though it be bitter-sweet. Oh, I would be 
Intoxicate with love, until I sink 

Into the deeps — or rise to ecstasy ! 



THE SACRAMENT OF LOVE 

The ground whereon we tread is holy ground, 
Made sacred by the myriad slow feet 
Of Life's successive ministers. We meet 

Beside the blessed table where man found 

The symbols of his Maker. In the round 
Of unremembered suns this bread we eat 
Was leavened, and this wine so mortal-sweet 

Was crushed from grapes grown beyond Time's grey 
bound. 

This cup whereof we drink is verily 

The blood of the atonement, and this bread 
The very body of Love. These drops were bled 

Upon the cross of Life in ecstasy. 

O potent sacrament! You seal in me 

The link between the unborn and the dead. 



188 



WHEN I SHALL LIE IN DEATH 

When I shall lie, Beloved, some dark day 

In the unbending dignity of death; 

When in my ear Love's potent shibboleth 
From your own lips no message shall convey, 
Nor bring the well-known answer ... do not say 

That God with me the Void replenisheth ! 

Though with your breath I do not mix my breath, 
Be not too sure that I have gone away., 

Your presence will be welcome as of old 
Beside the stately bed where I am laid; 

And though for the first time you find me cold. 
Know 'tis from terror of the waiting spade. 

Comfort and warm me in your living hold. 
And kiss my face — and do not be afraid. 



THE UNSPOKEN 

In the rapt silences between us two 

Are Love's last heights ascended. Keenly dear 
Are your love-vibrant tones, and when I hear 

Your whisper in the dark there trembles through 

My soul the star-choir's music. Yet I do 
Worship the silence, though sometimes I fear 
The too-revealing Presence it brings near — 

As if the hand of God touched me and you. 



189 



It seems that our two souls in some still place 
Pause for a pulseless moment, as if we 
Were masters of desire and destiny — 

Holding the planets poised in dizzy space. 

Look, Love! There in the dark the shining Face! 
The God of Silence calls us — it is He. 



HIDDEN BEAUTY 

In thy form's magic mirror of desire 

Beckons that Beauty hid from mortal sight. 
The rhythm that marked the elemental rite 

Of Being marks thy heartbeat, and the lyre 

Of the great leader of the stellar choir 

Is strung with hair like thine. When in the night 
Between thy lids I see love's glowing light, 

It is for me great Uriel's vigil-fire. 

What art thou, to unveil my vision so ! 

The pangs of the great Mother gave thee birth. 

To be a symbol on the alien earth 
Of those mysterious powers that spirits know. 

I was a pilgrim in a land of dearth; 
Thy coming made the corn and lilies grow. 



190 



THE PERVADER 

Beloved Light of the celestial deep ! 

Art Thou not trying to commune with me 
Through this dear mortal who so rapturously 

Clings to my veil of dust? Always I keep 

My tryst with Thee : when up the flaming steep 
Of passion's dizzy pinnacle I rise free 
One moment from the earth's blind sovereignty; 

Or in the lofty solitude of sleep. 

Wherever I look — Thou art. Even my bowl 
Of wine reflects Thy symbol from the skies; 
And, imaged on the mirror of Love's eyes, 
Thy meditative eyes regard my soul, 
Glowing with love unspeakable — Thou goal 
Of this my pilgrimage in human guise! 



RECOMPENSE 

When I consider all thou givest me 
In these miraculous hours I value so — 
The vision and the wonder that I know 

To be the veils of that Reality 

Behind the dreams of earth; and when I see 

How with thy tending all my soul-flowers grow. 
In very gratitude I would bestow 

Some rare incomparable gift on thee. 



191 



But when I gaze deep in thy raptured eyes. 
And see my own eyes in companioning 

Reflection fused with thine, I realise 
That in this unity of lives I bring 
Some boon beyond my own imagining, 

That is thy lonely spirit's long-sought prize. 



THE MAN 

Immeasurable thy being is to me. 

Lord of my fulfilled life ! The beauty line 
Of the world's orbital ellipse is mine 

In one encompassing eye-sweep of thee. 

Thy substance holds that secret chemistry 

Whereby the earth-dust flames, and is divine; 
And woven with thy body is the sign 

Of primal, demiurgic mystery. 

Without thee is my destiny denied; 

Though I stand symbol of the sea of space. 
The boundless gestatorium, the bride 

Of the Supreme. Only in thine embrace 
My small ephemeral life is amplified. 

Is blent with the imperishable race. 



192 



ILLUMINATION 

When my receptive lips are fused with thine 

In that pure flame whose fuel is ecstasy, 

All of the lost, forgotten poetry 
Of unrecorded ages touches mine 
With gift of inspiration. Powers divine, 

Answering thine ardent summons, move in me. 

Measureless days, and wider days to be. 
Challenge my hour for the lyric countersign. 

Unborn religions burn me in thine eyes; 
The devotees of undelivered years 
Mirror their visions there, in thy love tears. 

And lure my lips to drink them. I am wise 
With the deep lore of disembodied seers. 

When God breathes over me thy passion sighs. 



THE SONG AND THE SINGER 

Life has no honour to surpass the pride 
Of the undaunted singer. When I feel 
Love's rhythmic waves, that make my being reel. 

Go royally and steadily as a bride 

In measured march of song; when I confide 
To all the world my secret soul's appeal — 
Wound round with lyric veils that half reveal — 

Then is my hour of living magnified. 



193 



Then do I hear strange voices answer me 
Across the waiting silence. And I know. 
Beloved, that our yearning dreams shall flow 
Into their dreams, as rivers find the sea, 
And unborn lovers love more tenderly 
Because we loved each other long ago. 



THE EAGLES 

O EAGLE mate of mine, the souls are few 

That scale the height where we have made our nest 
Above the perilous chasm ! Breast to breast 

We battle with, the darkness, and the clue 

To our far flight is written in the true 

Eyes of the constellations. All unguessed 
In the dull valley is the dizzy quest 

That calls us to patrol the pathless blue. 

The air is thin where we entice our brood 

Of young to measure their frail wings with Fate; 

But they are nourished on ethereal food. 
Found only on these crags inviolate. 

Facing the wind, the void, the solitude. 
We are God's pioneers, O eagle mate! 



194 



THE TABERNACLE 

When from the cloud along the mountain height 

The Lord decreed that thou. Love, shouldst be made, 

Was not the mighty architect afraid. 
And blinded by the vision and the light? 
O covenantal ark of sacred rite. 

Law-holding heart, with pure gold overlaid! 

Between thy winged cherubim, love-rayed, 
The Presence will commune with me this night. 

For I have laved me at the outer gate; 

Around my soul's blue robe the golden bells 
And pomegranates are broidered, and I wait 

The word of Him that in this temple dwells. 

The Power descends, it permeates, compels; 
And my soul testifies, " The Lord is great." 



LOVE'S HUMBLENESS 

I KNOW the pride of Love, the happiness 

Of gratified possession, wearing high 

Its diadem no envy can deny: 
I know the power of the withheld caress 
That leaves Love unsubdued, but weaponless; 

I know Love's unveiled look that blinds the eye; 

I know the splendid joys that magnify 
Poets who Love's beatitudes express. 



195 



But till I learned Love's humbleness, I knew 
Only Love's alphabet. 'Twas when I lay 
A beggar at Love's knees the livelong day. 

That I discerned this final master-clue: 

'Tis better for a lover to bedew 

Love's feet with tears, than walk earth's royal way. 



LOVE'S BAPTISM 

From the pure baptism of my love you rise 
As a white saint dips in the sacred lake 
And comes out shining. All your soul awake 

Lives in your face, and would immortalise 

One who revealed it in art's master guise 

For all the world. Had life the power to make 
Me such a painter ! But my hand would shake. 

For this is what you tell me with your eyes: — 

I am your sea of healing, and the door 
Wliereby you enter God's abiding place; 

Your trembling hopes are hidden in my hair; 
I am your volume of unwritten lore; 

My breasts for you are cups of cosmic grace. 
My dreams the pillars of your house of prayer. 



196 



THE ICY PATH 

Thy soul and mine are walking warily 
Along a line of ice, a narrow way 
Between two seas of flame. The cruel day 

We banish by closed eyelids, for to see 

The cold white glitter were a mockery. 

Should we unveil our eyes we could not stay 
Upon the path; our steps would disobey; 

Our souls would slip into the raging sea. 

Love, how the warm waves woo our icy feet! 
Our foreheads lifted for the polar wind 

Are fanned by tropic airs ... we lose our aim 
Dizzy and drunken in the swimming heat. 

Swaying toward some lost wonder we must find, 
We fall into the pulsing sea of flame. 



A QUESTION ^ 

Is it thy body that I love — thy soul — 
Or some mysterious dweller beyond both? 
Alas, I do not know! But I am loath 

To reckon as mere dust this aureole 

My dreams have drawn about thee. Life's control 
Drew from the earth the substance for Love's growth. 
As for the lilies' ; and Desire made oath 

That Beauty's form should greet us at the goal. 



197 



But whether Love be blossom of the earth 
Or of the spirit — let all question cease. 

I only know my arid being's dearth 

Grew roses in thy presence; that increase 

Of vivid life came with our passion's birth^ 
And to my lips the rose-leaf lips of Peace. 



THE RHYTHMIC HEART 

With wonder-waiting breath and dream-closed eyes, 

I listen to the far mysterious sound 

Of your heart's tides, as some child who has found 
A convoluted shell, and verifies 
The story that the boundless ocean sighs 

Within it for his ears; though all around 

Are only waving trees and solid ground — 
A prisoned memory there that never dies. 

Your beating heart, Beloved, holds for me 

Such memories of the Ocean whence you came. 
Washed up on Time's cold margin like a shell 
Upon the earth-beach. All Eternity — 

Yours and the world's and God's their Law proclaim 
In the rhythmic ringing of this cosmic bell. 



198 



THE PRESENCE a- 

Your presence is enough for happiness, 
Without a word or pressure of the hand. 
Near you the blossoms of my soul expand 

Like lily buds at sunrise, that express 

Their joy in fragrant silence. I possess 

Your thought without a medium, andl demand 
Nothing of all Love's ministers that stand 

Waiting beyond this bodiless caress. 

Nay, do not touch me for a little while, 
And speak no word, even of poetry. 

Only the stillness of your lyric smile 

Shall bear the message of your soul to me. 

As through your misty eyes, blue mile on mile, 
I sail on feeling's immaterial sea. 



THE SPHERE OF LOVE 

When in the circle of my arms' embrace 
Close I enfold you, I encompass, Dear, 
The opulent earth, and whisper in its ear. 

I look the soul of the planet in the face. 

And feel against my cheek the winds of space 
With every breath of yours. How can I fear 
The need of aught? In Love's ideal sphere 

Are hidden all life's lines of power and grace. 



199 



Beyond the self's dividual boundary 

We touch that interspiritual goal 
iWhere two in one dissolve in ecstasy, 

Leaving a tracing on the terrene scroll 
Of the fourth dimension of Love's mystic sea — 

The metaphor, the poetry of the soul. 



THE TOUCH OF BEAUTY 

What is that magical strange quality, 

That gives to all the words and ways of you 
Something supernal? Others are as true 

Expressions of the inner thought, maybe; 

But they are prose, and you are poetry. 

You merely look at me — and something new 
Calls me to give it form; some faint, far clue 

Touches me from a world I cannot see. 

And sometimes when the beauty is not so high 
It overpowers me, I am moved to sing. 

But, O Beloved, how mere words belie 

The wonder of that half-embodied thing! 

It merely brushes me in going by. 

But leaves me all alive and quivering. 



200 



THE UNASSUAGABLE 

The ache of unassuagable desire! 

When my enraptured form is full of thee — 
Drenched with thy love and broken utterly - 

The spirit all thy power can never tire 

Burns steadily, an unconsuming fire. 
Oh, the long calling down eternity 
Of the prisoned self that never can be free 

Until its days of separateness expire! 

Give me again thy lips, and let me lie 

In listening silence on thy rhythmic heart. 
The measures of that great musician's art 
Entrance my soul — but cannot satisfy 
Its thirst for unity. Oh, let me die, 

And be of thy very self a throbbing part! 



AT LOVE*S FEET 

Here where I lie a pilgrim at Love's feet, 

Palm pressed to palm in pure humility. 

Are many wonders they may never see 
Whose brows challenge the morning. Strangely sweet 
This realm where mastery and service meet. 

Losing themselves in Love's immediacy. 

Its guarded gate reveals that mystery 
Reserved for those whose lesson is complete. 



201 



Here Pride and Passion yield their ancient power, 
And Faith, twin-born with Knowledge, blends with him 
In one clear revelation. Since man's eyes 
Saw first in vision Love's rare momitain flower, 
Some souls have sought it on the perilous rim 

Of Self's cold avalanche — and grasped the prize. 



FROM THE VOID 

When swimming in the sea of Love's embrace, 
Under the rays of the meridian sun, 
I hear a Voice in the void, and one by one 

The veils of substance fall from off the face 

Of my free spirit. In the urgent race 

Toward the white shore where being is begun 
In harmony supernal, I have won 

From ravished Life the keys of time and space. 

The Universe in semblance of man's form 
Descends upon the waters, and I hold 
Close to my heart the secret rarely told 

Before to any mortal. Human-warm 
And soft for me, this Presence I enfold 

Can walk the sea and curb the will of the storm. 



202 



LOVE LIGHT 

Beloved, in those first remembered days 
We smiled into Love's face, not questioning 
His meaning, as gay children in the spring 

Laugh in the face of joyous winds whose ways 

They are too frail to follow. But the gaze 
Of Love grew serious, discovering 
A nascent, interspiritual thing — 

Nameless on earth, that set our souls ablaze. 

Have mortals ever seen the steady light 

That now bums in Love's eyes? To me it seems 
The answer to some question asked in dreams 

And then forgotten. And it thrills my sight — 
As if the sun, with flame-compelling streams. 

Had hurled a new strange planet down the night. 



THE RIVEB 

Along the woods and meadows of my days 
The thought of thee majestically flows. 
Like some great river that in gladness goes 

Down to the ocean. All thy fertile ways 

Are blossom-bordered, for in Love's warm rays 
Each kiss of thine becomes a crimson rose 
And every tear a lily, pure as those 

White blooms that won the Galilean's praise. 



203 



Thou art the Nile and I am the land of Kem. 
River of joy^ making my arid years 

A garden of sweet fragrance and of song! 
Enriched by thee, my fields have made arrears 
Of all neglected harvests, and a throng 
Of labourers in due time shall garner them. 



AT THE SUPREME HOUR 

When comes the supreme hour for me to die; 
When, justified of life, I turn at last 
To question the pale secret of the past 

And to be one with it, O Love, that I 

May have thy clinging lips to fortify 

My spirit for the j ourney ! I would cast 
My soul upon thy kiss, as on some vast 

And shoreless ocean refluent with the sky. 

And may this dual, intimate ecstasy 

Be as my bark to venture the unknown. 
Then to whatever region I am blown 

By the death winds of evening, I shall be 
Borne upon rapture — nevermore alone — 

Though incorporeal, still one with thee. 



204 



THE OASIS 

If I had not the patience of the earth, 
That hour on hour develops the slow seed, 
And age on age attains each racial deed, 

I should despair of ever being worth 

The wonder of your love. In Life's grey dearth. 
My sun-scorched oasis bore scarce a weed. 
Then you reclaimed me, and my spirit freed 

From the arid loneness of untimely birth. 

Your love is like spring-water, and has made 
A greenness in my desert; 'tis the deep 

Source of my hope's tall palm-trees, that withstand 
Life's whirling winds and wild Saharian sand. 
Your love is like the placid stars that keep 
Vigil, that I may never be afraid. 



THE THOUGHT OF THEE 

Sometimes, Beloved, the mere thought of theel 
Is potent as a Kabalistic spell 
To conjure up thy presence. I compel^ 

The latent forms of air to rise and be 

A body for my vision, fearlessly 

Beckoning thy soul to enter. Then I tell 
That wraith such wonders that the sentinel 

Behind the doors of absence bends to me. 



205 



The thought of thee is poetry more pure 
Than any that I lock in measured lines. 

The thought of thee is lights that shall endure 
Into the darkness when our day declines; 

The thought of thee is prayer_^ that can allure 
Angels to aid us in our love's designs. 



LOVE'S IMMORTALITY c^ 

Among those things that make our love complete. 
And high beyond all others I have known^ 
This knowledge is not least: That we have sown 

Together seeds of beauty, that shall greet 

Strange years in blossoms which the reckless feet 
Of Death shall not destroy; that we have shown 
To blinded eyes the visions of our own. 

Making our blood in, others' veins to beat. 

Why should we yearn for immortality 

In some imagined heaven, when on the earth 
Our flowers of song perfume the dusty road. 
And speak to passers by of you and me.^ 
Enough that we have justified our birth. 
Ere entering the inscrutable abode. 



206 



BEYOND THE DRAGON'S GATE 

Of lesser loves I have known jealousy. 

But of thy love, my comrade — nay, Ah, nay ! 

Our separate jealous selves are one to-day. 
Absorbed and mingled in our unity. 
In the dim future should it ever be 

Some other love allured thee, I would say: 

" The brother of my life, who is away 
On his soul's business, will return to me. 
Bringing new knowledge with him: so I wait." 

And though with pain my lonely lips were dry. 
My learning soul would listen at the gate 

That looks along life's road, for thy far cry 
On the world's rim. Only we intimate 

Of spirit know the meaning of that tie! 



THE TIDES 

The daily hours my lover is away 
Are like the long recession of the sea 
Between the tides, but when he comes to me 

The surf beats on the shore. This hour the grey 

Sands are all dry far out, and rocks display 
Their sinister faces, that I never see 
Save when the ebb-tide's far uncertainty 

Of absence makes a desert of the day. 



207 



But in the rushing joy of his return, 

The menacing old rocks will bathe their faces, 
And all their deep, hard lines will be no more; 
The lonely sands of minutes that now yearn 
To greet him will be lost in his embraces, 
And loving waves will dance along the shore. 



ATTAINMENT 

To-DAY I pondered long on the rewards 

That beckon man's endeavour: gold, and power. 
And fame, and love, and pleasure's passing hour 

Of sweet, that but a memory accords 

Unto the future. And I asked the lords 
Of my own stars what individual flower 
Of consummation bloomed in my life's bower — 

Was it the best the jealous world affords? 

I thought of my songs, but their abiding worth 

Is yet unproven in the court of Time; 

Thought of the will whose sinews help me climb 
The cliffs of Art — that was a gift of birth. 

Then thought I of your love . . my one sublime 
Attainment in the dizzy round of earth. 



208 



TIPHERATH 

When I caress your dear face^ lyii^g so, 
Beauty, the great Sephira, looks at me 
With visible eyes; and though I cannot see 

The border of his garment, yet I know 

It sweeps the far horizon. Visions blow 
Across my rapt brain, as ecstatically 
The night winds move your hair, and poetry 

Too high for comprehension here below. 

You are, my Love, a medium in space 

Eternal, through whom sovereign Beauty burns 
To manifest. Winged with your love, I reach 
A sphere beyond the scope of human speech; 
And in the dark with you my soul discerns 
Dimly God's unimaginable face. 



THE ENTITY 

Love, is it I, or thou? There seems to be 
Only one soul here in the darkness now. 
Only one body. Is it I, or thou? 

Thy form is the extended boundary 

That marks the dual consciousness of me. 
I feel as mine the locks upon thy brow, 
As mine thy long white feet. Oh, tell me how 

Never to go outside the gates of thee! 



209 



Hid from the hollow world, I would remain 

Within this lily garden of delight; 

Would move not, sleep not through the long sweet 
night. 
I would forget that we were ever twain, 
Forget that I shall find myself again 

Standing alone in freedom's glaring light. 



THE INSPIRER 

When words of mine are read in after days 
By those unnumbered ones who slumber now 
In that vast sea man's latent loves endow 

With all-potential being, should their gaze 

Turn wondering along Time's buried ways 
To our dim day, my Love, questioning how 
I wove this wreath of heart-songs for the brow 

Of my strong mate, 'tis thou whom they should praise. 

If praise be due. For I am but the lyre 

Thy sure hand plays upon — thy master hand, 

Whose touch allures the silence of desire 
To mystic revelation, whose command 

Rouses the spirits of creative fire 

To utter speech that men may understand. 



210 



WHEN YOU ARE SAD 

When you are sad, Beloved, my soul hears 
The far-off sighing and unworded pain 
Of all earth's buried lovers; the cold rain 

Of all their lonely unremembered tears 

Falls on my heart afresh. Ancestral fears, 
Lurking among the shadows of my brain 
Like ghosts among the living, weave a chain 

Of immemorial omens down the years. 

Your joy isi of the hour, and pleasures me 

Like sunshine and the spring; your smiles are flowers 
That bloom in my life's meadows wild and sweet. 
But in your sadness broods eternity. 

Beyond the tides of aeons and of hours . . . 
I hear its music in your slow heartbeat. 



THE LYRIC SEED 

Love, you are full of songs and lyric seed 
And wild harmonic measures, and your eyes 
Teem with the forms my vision magnifies: 

There the idea trembles toward the deed 

As man trembles toward woman. I can read 
In you the pass-word of the sphere that lies 
Beyond us in the spiritual skies. 

Waiting the world's indomitable need. 



211 



In you are words unknown in any tongue, 
But potent are their meanings to inspire 
My soul, love-quickened. Inarticulate 
Ardours are there, and melodies unsung, 
And poem-hopes; and Love's prophetic lyre 
Shall give their voice authority with Fate. 



IN THE STILLNESS 

Last night thy lips. Beloved, on my face 
Yearned in a soul-rapt stillness more intense 
Than love's last passion; with such reverence 

I feel that tenuous spirits must embrace. 

Who meet each other in the shining space 
Beyond the bourne. A fearless conference 
Our souls held through the eyes, their mystic sense 

Revealing, like a veil, unearthly grace. 

To-day I wander in a world of dreams. 

The throbbing of the city is to me 
Far off and alien; and its murmur seems 

Merged in the sounds of stars, whose light I see 
At noonday, through a luminous air that teems 

With forms of wonder and immensity. 



212 



THE REVELATION 

Spirit whose graciousness reveals to me 

Thy Self as the real presence in Love's eyes ! 
His form is Thine inviolable disguise 

Of flame-wrought dust. Within that veil I see 

The symbols of Thine ancient alchemy; 
I see the hidden aim that sanctifies 
To immortal use Love's burden of sad sighs, 

And all his brief earth-born felicity. 

And though continually I look behind 

This mortal beauty for the deathless One — 
That Substance of whose shadow is the sun, — 

To Thine extended hand I had been blind. 
Maybe forever, had Thy love not spun 

This passionate web wherein I am entwined. 



A DREAM OF DEATH 

I DREAMED this midnight that my Love was dead; 
And when I groping found again the place 
Where I had left sleep's door ajar, his face 

Shone pallid still against the wall of dread 

Before me. And his voice in sorrow said: 
" Seek me forever in the empty space 
Beyond the moon, for I may not retrace 

The road whereon I dropped Love's golden thread." 



213 



I cannot find in all the ways of night 
One star to comfort me with promises 

Even though unfulfilled, nor on the wind 
A murmur of music. I am cold with fright, 
Lest in the shadows and the silences 

Seeking his form, I leave his soul behind. 



THE ABIDING PEACE 

Your love is like the brooding of warm wings, 
And all the restfulness of night for me 
When I am weariest; my troubles flee 

Away like twilight ghosts when the moon flings 

Her lovely glamour over earthly things. 
You are the firmament of poetry 
Above my soul, wherein continually 

The passion-bird of Beauty soars and sings. 

The shelter of your love is my release 

From the world sorrow. On my lips you lay 
The lyric spell whose word survives the day; 
And in your arms is that abiding peace 
Never to fail me should the star-dance cease, 
And Time, the piper, claim his cosmic pay. 



214 



THE SOWER 

Thou art a sower of that potent seed 

Whose vital flower shall fructify the ages. 
By thy strong sowing shall a thousand sages 

Rise into being in the days of need 

From the world's fertile soil. No noxious weed 
Shall rob the weary husbandman of wages 
On the fields thoa hast sown, and God's own mages 

Shall measure them the harvest by their meed. 

I am a field of thine; within my breast 

The seeds of power are stirring in their sleep 

Before the great awakening. Strange unrest 
Rouses me ere the dawnlight walks the deep; 

Then go I forth to toil, at Love's behest. 
Tilling my field that all the world shall reap. 



MASTER 

On my life's road there stands one shining day. 
Lone and exalted above everything, — 
The day my woman-spirit hailed you king, 

Humble and proud, acknowledging your sway. 

Though altars mark my sacrificial way 
Across the world, yet to the gods I bring 
Naught else like this: That round your knees I cling. 

Whispering, " Master, speak, and I obey ! " 



215 



In Love's rose garden is a hidden shrine, 
A secret temple where high spirits meet; 

The password is pure silence, and the sign 
That gains the door — humility complete. 

'Tis when my spirit touches the divine, 

You feel my tears and kisses on your feet. 



THE UNRECORDED 

If any lover ever loved like you. 
He did not love a poet; for I look 
In vain for word of him in the slender book 

Of woman-song. Your tender ways are new 

In this untender world, and shining through 
The meshes of your passion are the eyes 
No mortal sees unveiled — the love-lit eyes 

That wait the spirit in the fiery bluei 

Beyond life's shifting rainbow. In your face 
The deathless Vision lures me — if I dare 

To follow it across the void of space. 

And yearning toward your beauty, unaware 

My soul has found the one abiding place. 
Beyond the goal of every lonely prayer. 



216 



THE CLUE 

When fused in your embrace my soulj is free 

With all mankind. Hidden away in you 

Are unimagined vistas, and my clue 
You are to that abiding Mystery 
Behind all men and women. When for me 

Your eyes are wet with Love's primeval dew, 

I am the dreami reflected ; and I view 
The vision of my self with ecstasy. 

Within your soul the souls of myriads reach! 

Toward the obscure Beyond. You are the sire — 
The all-potential father who shall teach 

The gospel of attainment and desire. 

Your torch shall light the future's signal fire. 
And through your :word the voiceless attain speech. 



THE SUPREME GIFT 

What is the dearest gift thou bringest me 

To prove thy love.^ Is it thy tenderness? — 
The grandeur of thy passion .f* — thy caress? — 

Thy soul that offers itself utterly? 

These are great gifts, but not unique in thee. 

Aye, though thy boons bestowed are numberless. 
One passes all the others: I possess 

Therein the life-pledge of our unity. 



217 



That pledge is understanding. In my eyes 
Is written all my weakness, all my power, 

And thou canst read the writing! Fear's disguise 
Falls from our faces in the faith-lit bower 

That shields our full revealing. We are wise 
Beyond all isolate beings in that hour. 



LOVE'S BAY AND NIGHT 

The darkness never gathers round my heart 
When your eyes shine upon me; for my day 
Is measured by your coming, and the grey 

Chill twilight of the hour when you depart. 

The sun-warmth of your smile makes love-buds start 
All down my tree of life; and when we say 
Love's litany, the winds from far away 

Breathe us responses with heaven's lyric art. 

And in the desolation of that night 

When thou, my sun of life, art hid from me 

By the dense world, I know thy loving light 
Blazes around my orbit; though I see 

Only that pallid and reflecting wight — 
The unsubstantial moon of memory. 



218 



THE HIDDEN ONE 

Love, in that labyrinthine house of thine, 

Where does thy spirit hide? Long have I sought 
Its door down all the corridors of thought, 

In every impulse, every luring line 

That is thy being; but the outer sign 

Has veiled itself in beauty. Whence was brought 
Thy mystic flame, wherein earth's dust was caught 

And fused with love, reflecting the Divine ? 

Thou art all mine, in answer to my prayer: 
Mine in thy purposes, thy faith, thy will; 
My dreams of unity thou dost fulfil; 

My secret seal is on thee everywhere. 

Yet when I love thee most, I am aware 

Of a strange something that eludes me still. 



SPIRIT OF BEAUTY 

Spirit of Beauty ! Let me worship thee. 
Robed in the form of my beloved one. 
Thy look, that flres the fierce meridian sun^ 

Is too tremendous in its majesty 

For mortal gaze to dare. Give me to see. 
Over the eyes of Love, thy glamour spun 
Of filaments of dreams that were begun 

Before Orion rode in Gemini. 



219 



Spirit of Beauty, I had never known 
Thy bodiless, immortal dwelling place, 

Save for this lovely mortal shadow thrown 
Upon the screen of time. And I can trace, 
In every line of Love's illumined face. 

The meaning and the wonder of thine own. 



THE EMBLEM 

In worshipping my Love I worship Thee — 
O Thou inscrutable Kindler of the sun! 
He is the emblem of all things in one; 

He is the medium of my unity 

With Thine infinitude. There is for me, 

Recorded in Love's eyes, all Thou hast done 
Of wonder since the ages were begun 

In sleep's undifferentiated sea. 

My Lover is for me the Book of Prayer; 
His every line is poetry profound 

With esoteric meanings. In his hand 
Are messages that Faith has written there; 
And in the lessons his warm lips propound 
Is all the wisdom I can understand. 



220 



THE GUARDIAN OF THE TEMPLE 

Gaze in my eyes, deeper and still more deep ! 
Behind these windows dwells the soul of me 
In solitude: enter thou there and be 

The guardian of the temple. Thou shalt keep 

The keys that open all the doors of sleep — 
The mystic portals of that unity 
In whose embrace I quiver with ecstasy. 

Beyond the bourne of those who laugh and weep. 

Cover* me with the shadow of thy breath. 

So blinding is the spiritual light 
Of this high place, the moon looks white as Death, 

And the stars hide them in the hair of Night. 
O Love, thy lips ! Between them quivereth 

The very wing of God in earthward flight! 



WOMAN-LOVE ^ 

Thou art the Unimaginable to me, 

The Source that sends the sunshine and the spring 

To bless my spirit. Gratefully I bring 
My golden lily of life a gift to thee — 
Fragrant with faith and immortality. 

Make me the blossom of sweet offering 

Upon the altar of thy ministering. 
Only thy bonds can set my spirit free. 



221 



Yea, I will do all service that is meet 
Unto the master from the neophyte — 
Trim thy soul's lamp, and keep thy vesture white. 

Thy mouth shall have the morsels that are sweet. 
My mouth the bitter; and my only right 

Shall be to bind the sandals on thy feet. 



THE INNER LIGHT 

Sometimes I see a light within your eyes. 
Not of the earth, as if the hidden sun — 
The vast pervading immaterial One — 

Shone for a moment through its own disguise 

Of planetary substance. Visions rise 
In that divine candescence, visions spun 
Of hoarded yearnings; 'twas their power which won 

From the Invisible its guarded prize. 

Love, in that light our guardian angels lean 
So close to earth, almost their wings catch fire 
In the upleaping flame of our desire 

Each to the other. And this burning screen 
Of mortal dust, that severs soul from soul. 
Is known to the stars as Love's world-aureole. 



222 



THE PARADIGM 

Now you and I indissolubly one, 
Find in our unity the master clue 
To the realm of dual spirits, all is new 

For us in earth and heaven. We have spun 

A web of dreams that reaches to the sun. 

Yet stronger is than steel. Our hopes pursue 
Even the reticent gods, that watch us through 

Life's window with a smiling benison. 

No longer can two souls that merely rhyme 
Seem one to us, though joined with poetry. 

Now we have found Love's secret paradigm 
Which all men feel but know not, we shall be 

A double mark upon the disc of time 
That shall attract the eye of Eternity. 



LOOKING UPWARD 

My heart is sad and tremulous to-night. 

Knowing my love less pure than it should be; 

For shadow-thoughts of self persistently 
Intrude between thine image and the light. 
If anything be dearer in thy sight 

Or higher than woman's love, ask it of me! 

Silence, or sacrifice, or ecstasy 
Of meditation's God-immediate height. 



223 



Is there some purer name than Love? If so^ 
It shall be thine^ even in my secret prayer: 
Brother, or Friend, or aught — I do not care. 

So it be dear as that I would forego. 

But I should call thee Love in dreams, I know. 
And bear that memory of thee everywhere. 



THE BROKEN PRAYER 

Lost in Life's maze I seek that dreadful Throne 

Where God's vrise children breathe, Thy will be done! 
But in between me and Faith's blazing sun 

I see Love's eyes, and hear his broken moan, 

" O leave me not. Beloved ! " Can I own 
God's fragment dearer to me than the One, 
Supreme, Eternal? 'Twas His hand that spun 

This veil between the known and the unknown. 

Fain would I tread that steep, immortal way — 
And yet the arms of Love are yearning sweet! 

My soul is tangled in the ropes of clay. 

And passion's thorns have torn my faltering feet. 

Unworthy am I, for I weep and say, 

Thy will be done, O God — hut not to-day! 



224. 



THE OPENER 

Love, you have opened many doors for me 
To many mansions. You have held the gate 
Of joy ajar, and when reluctant Fate 

Clutched at my mantle, you have set me free. 

You touched the fragile portal of poetry 
And it sprang open, for my soul elate 
To enter; then you led me to the great. 

Stern, smiling, Janus-faced Philosophy. 

But now it is the gate of Purgatory 
You open for me; and my soul's desire 

Goes on before us — not with tears and cries, 
But gladly like the souls in Dante's story — 
The saved souls that with joy embrace the fire 
Which purges them for the heights of Paradise. 



THE SACRIFICE 

As thou wast consecrated ere we met 

To sacred service on this orphaned earth. 
And I, though loving, am of little worth 

Against thine austere mission to be set; 

I who have worn thy love an amulet 

About my neck, mine by our stars of birth. 
Now bid thee go — leaving my days a dearth ; 

Now pay the world my vast and sovereign debt. 



225 



There is a need of thee greater than mine, 
O thou beloved ambassador of God! 

With my heart's blood do thou thy vows re-sign; 
While I walk back alone the road we trod 
Together, and the trampling years, pain-shod. 

Pursue me down the perilous incline. 



THE VALLEY OF DISMAY 

I CAME to-night along a lonely way, 
Under a cold monotonous grey sky 
That seeks no sunrise. Fallen rocks deny 

*My passage backward to the fading day; 

Above my head the living trees decay ; 
And trailing passionate poison-ivies lie 
Along the ground, reaching thin hands to tie 

My footsteps in this valley of dismay. 

Love, where art thou who yesterday held warm 
My soul and body interblent with thee.^ 

I call thy name — but only a wild swarm 
Of demon echoes answer mockingly; 

While down the gulf rides the dishevelled storm. 
With some dumb awful message meant for me. 



226 



THE GREAT BARK 

Beloved, in the space that yearns between 

Thy breast and mine these bitter separate days, 
Are measured all the tortuous dim ways 

Where sightless spirits wander — the dark screen 

That hides from mortal sight the soul's demesne. 
My path is lost in this bewildering maze 
Of many windings. Taunting spectres craze 

Me^ mocking the caresses that have been. 

Brave thou this dolorous region where I grope 
Among the shades, and lead me toward the light. 
Deny me love, but vesture me in white. 

And gird about my waist the knotted rope 

Of sacrifice. Then guide me toward some height 

Too lofty for this aching human hope. 



THE TITAN 

I KNOW this Titan suffering was not laid 
For nothing on my spirit, for I gain 
By growing to the stature of my pain. 
How else could God endure it — He who made 
The pact of Fatherhood with me, and weighed 
In His vast scales the hopes that I have slain 
In saying, " Thy will be done " } Without His chain 
Of worship round my soul, my heart, afraid. 
Would stumble down the mountain of despair 
And break upon the rocks. To little minds 

227 



God throws the crumbs of sorrow; but to me — 
Why, He has seated me in His great chair 

Beside the board of grief, and Himself grinds 
And kneads and bakes the bread of cruelty ! 



THE WELL OF TEARS 

Will you, far off, weep too in that glad hour, 
When I shall find the well of tears now hid 
Deep in the rocks of pain? Will God forbid 

Ever that I shall pluck the golden flower 

Of peace upon its margin? I would dower 
With all my song the meanest slave that bid 
My lips to drink its waters, and be rid 

Of this mad thirst that strangles all my power. 

When I shall weep, Beloved, the kind rain 
Must cool your burning forehead that I see 
Fire-circled in my dreams. I would not dare 
To quaff a comfort that you might not share. 
Though through the fierce noons of eternity 
I stand with you on these red cliffs of pain. 



228 



WITHIN LOVE'S VEIL 

O Thou whose hand has lifted high Thy veil 
One blazing moment, that my Love and I 
Might see Thy beauty, do not — or I die — 

Leave me again in darkness! Should I fail 

Of sovereign song; or prove too human-frail 
Thy seer-inspiring boon to justify, 
O let these tears, that choke my heart's love-cry. 

Weigh but a little for me in Thy scale ! 

For I so long abode in the earth-shade, 

That Thy refulgent beauty has blinded me. 

And I am tremulous, and half afraid. 
And cannot grasp the wonder that I see. 

But I would die should the white vision fade, 
Leaving me in the dark, bereft of Thee! 



WITHDRAWN 

Spirit of Wisdom, if Thy laws decree 
That groping in the dark I must abide. 
Why didst Thou draw Thy golden veil aside 

One blazing moment that my soul might see 

The splendour of Thy beauty? I would be 
More fully blest — or rigorously denied ! 
The veil has fallen and the light has died, 

But they have left great memories with me. 



229 



Spirit of Wisdoni_, are my upturned eyes 

Too dull with weeping to reflect Thy face? 
Has Love's consuming fever left a trace 
Too much of earth about me? All that dies 
With mortal breath my soul would sacrifice 
To feel the flame of Thy supreme embrace! 



THE EMPTY ROOM 



Alone I linger in Love's empty room 

Where hope, desire and dream no longer dwell; 

But memory stands, a pallid sentinel 
Between the inner and the outer gloom. 
The stars are weaving on Time's hidden loom 

No rarer wonders than these walls might tell — 

But will not ! Love's dismantled citadel 
Guards here the sacred silence of a tomb. 

And when my spirit shall have gone away 

In quest of Love where death and life confer. 

The silence of my empty home of clay 
Shall baffle every curious questioner, — 

Even as this room, whose walls will not betray 
Their knowledge of the secret things that were. 



S30 



THE LOVE-SINGER 

I SING of Love, dreaming the world may know 

Something of that pure Beauty that I feel; 

I sing of passion till the senses reel 
With the full rhythmic volume and overflow 
Of my own being; and then, soft and low, 

I sing of mystic visions that reveal 

God's mirrored eyes in Love's — His visible seal 
Set in the dust for all who come and go. 

But of Love's final secret, being wise 
I do not sing, — Love's terrible demand 

To lay his jewels for a sacrifice 

Upon the Spirit's altar . . . Through the land 

Should I go singing that, with unveiled eyes. 
Hardly a soul would even understand! 



231 



NOTE 

Poems in this collection have appeared in Scribner's, 
Harper's, The Century, Ainslee's, The Cosmopolitan, 
Munsey's, Lippincott's, The Smart Set, The Forum, The 
Woman's Home Companion, The BooJcman, The Metro- 
politan, Everybody's, Outing, The New England, The 
Reader, The New Age, The Broadway, The Era, and 
The Craftsman. Thanks are due to the editors of these 
magazines for the courteous permission to reprint. 



i 



APR 3 1912 



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